


Safe in Our Mold

by hawknat



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst too, Child Abuse, Eventual Romance, F/M, Flashbacks, Friendship, Ratings may change, and sometimes on the helicarrier and at the triskelion, chillaxing at clint's apartment, clint barton is not an idiot, deaf!clint (eventual), gotta love angst, natasha romanoff is not a robot, nothing graphic, only mentioned when they talk about their pasts, referenced rape/non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-07 21:24:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 40,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3183677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawknat/pseuds/hawknat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Past all the psych evaluations and debriefings, Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff do their real healing at Clint's apartment in New York; A tale of two assassins, hardened by their gruesome pasts, break down each other's walls, learn that they are human after all, and that there are more aspects to their partnerships than they anticipated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Month Four

 

M O N T H   F O U R

 

“Do you like apples?” Clint calls from the kitchen. The pants he’s wearing are a little oversized and crinkle around his calves and ankles. The archer treads down the hallway, two wet apples and two water bottles in his hand. He frowns slightly when he sees the Russian spy standing still in the middle of the living room area. Well, if you could call it that. Clint’s studio apartment doesn’t particularly have enough space to have a separate living room area. Sniper or not, long distance was meant for the field when he had unpredictable factors playing on him.

Here at home, he likes small spaces, where everything is in reach and he doesn’t have to crane his neck too far to get something he needs. Guns, arrows, knives, all in one place, just the way he likes it when it’s just him and silence in one area.

Natasha is different like that. He doesn’t know it yet but her place is much more spacious than Clint’s- a little too spacious for the archer’s shyness, she reckons. But she needs more than one place to hide. A bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom and some sort of space in the center of the apartment aren’t enough for Natasha. But she thinks the place is comfy either way. It has some sort of resemblance of _Clint_.

The furniture is an equal combination of minimalist and wood and she truly does think it’s exactly Clint- clean, crisp, and sharp.  
She catches the archer’s gaze on her, and he looks awkward, standing there with two apples and water bottles, loose-fitting pants and a red sweatshirt. It’s fall. He’s lazy with his wardrobe during this weather.

Perhaps he’s feeding off of her body language. She is the one standing there in the middle of his apartment like a fish out of water. The silent exchange between them is uncomfortable. Natasha has a small gun strapped to her thigh and two knives well hidden under her blouse and she bets Clint has weapons hidden in every crease and crevice in this cozy little studio apartment. She enjoys this kind of confidence. She feels as though they’re sharing some kind of wavelength, riding the same line of thought.

“Apples? You like?” Clint offers a fresh glistening apple to the assassin whose expression- nondescript, of course- doesn’t relent. She eyes the apple like it’ll blow up in her face if she blinks twice, “And uh, you know, you can have a seat. No popcorn explosives under the cushions, I promise.”

Natasha exhales and sits down on the wooden sofa with the deep purple cushions, taking her gun out of its holster and placing it on the table. She checks Clint’s face to see any changes but he just gives her an understanding nod. He isn’t thrown off by the fact that she carried a weapon into his apartment. Good.

“Popcorn explosives?” Natasha says, and it’s the first word she breathes since she stepped foot inside. Her husky voice is so opposite her face, Clint loves it. He loves how she opposes all the odds.

“It’s a, uh, a prank thing, I’ll show it to you sometime,” Clint shakes his head, softly grinning before offering her an apple for the third time.

Natasha takes it in her deceivingly small hands, weighing it like she would a gun.

“It’s a granny smith, not a Sig Sauer, Nat.”

Her nose wrinkles at the moniker. It’s still new to her, having a nickname. Clint is pretty insistent on varying between Nat, Tash, and Tasha, before just calling her Natasha. When she’d asked him last month why he felt the need to shorten her name like that, he just shrugged while wrapping guard tape around his hand. He never answered her question and she decided it was better than what other men thought to call her. She doesn’t quite mind that he gives her those nicknames, even if it is still new to the ex-KGB assassin.

“Not like this,” Natasha mumbles, reaching under her blouse to pull out a knife that Clint didn’t even realize she had on her.

Trained and delicate, like it’s second nature, she angles the knife into the apple, just a few millimeters into the fruit and peels away the surface in swift swipes until the green skin flutters into a pile on the glass table in front of the sofa.

“Like this,” she looks at Clint with an unmasked smile. She’s showing her teeth and tightens her lips when she realizes, schooling her face back into neutrality. Clint’s presence has a way of catching her off guard like that. Sometimes she minds.

“You don’t like the skin on your apples?” Clint asks incredulously. He places the water bottle in front of her.

“Mmm-mmm,” Natasha shakes her head before taking a small bite into the fruit. Its tartness is somehow sweet and tickles the insides of her mouth.

“That’s ridiculous, Tash. The skin is like- it’s like having milk with cookies. Or ice cream on a hot summer day. It just goes together, you know?” Clint bites a dramatic chunk out of his apple as if he’s proving a point.

“I’ve never had ice cream before,” Natasha admits quietly, taking another delicate bite, “I hate the cold. I imagine it’s like Russia, only in your mouth and in your lungs.”

“We’ll see about that,” Clint makes the conscious effort not to make a big deal out of her admission. He knows she lead a life behind iron bars, machine guns, and too many hands in her head. Last thing she needs now is a judgmental prick who doesn’t know how to handle blunt honesty. He bites into his apple a second time, less dramatic than the first bite. His voice doesn’t hold an ounce of threat in it, “Say we head to the supermarket and get some ice cream. I bet you’ve got a secret sweet tooth.”

“Not right now. It’s warm in here,” Natasha protests, taking a third bite. She swallows before setting the apple in her lap and downing a few gulps of water.

She notices that Clint does the same and they continue to eat in quiet, or at least Clint does.

Natasha looks around the apartment, her posture stiff and never quite relaxing against the cushions. She likes the lighting in here. Everything is clearly built and coordinated to Clint’s needs. She sees his bow lined against the opposite wall, three target pads well-worn from frequent use, a lone guitar in the corner. Along the right wall is a built-in shelf holding what Natasha can only assume is music albums. There’s a dictionary, an Arabic-English translation book, and a picture of a golden retriever sitting in a generic picture frame.

“You have a dog?” she asks.

“Nah, but I’d like one,” Clint confesses, “Golden retrievers are my favorite but I love dogs in general. There was an abandoned dog, a retriever that lived in my town when I was growing up. He was always wandering around and slept wherever, even on our lawn. I don’t have a clue what happened to it at some point but they’re my favorite breed. It’s the classic American pet,” he shrugs apologetically, “I’d own one now but you can’t exactly take your dog to SHIELD every day unless you’re disabled and require a service dog.”

“You’re a sap,” Natasha accuses, fighting the urge to nudge him, “An animal lover. How very Iowan of you.”

“What gave away the fact that I’m from Iowa?” Clint looks genuinely surprised. That was quick. Was he _that_ obvious?

“Your file did.”

“Huh,” a dark look passes over Clint’s eyes. He doesn’t know why, but knowing that she read his file stings. “You could have just asked me, Natasha. You know, friends talk to each other, get to know each other, peel away each other’s layers. Hacking through your partner’s file isn’t really the best foot to start on.”

“Friendship is a very grey area for me. It’s not a term I use without caution,” Natasha says, looking at her apple which now disagrees with her appetite. She wants to throw it out but she doesn’t want to be rude. Frankly, who the hell offers apples as a meal when they have people over?

“Hey, I let you into my apartment didn’t I?” Clint says, tossing his pit into the metal bin by the door without even looking.

Natasha simply shrugs, glancing back down at her unfinished apple and the mess of skin she’s made on the table.

“It’s been three months since Prague, Tash. At least give me something. Anything,” Clint decides he’s grown bored with the tense silence. She was the one after all who asked him to show her his place. She is the Black Widow, a woman who’s sat in puddles of blood and stared death right in its eyes while its hands were clenched tight around her neck. Clint largely doubts that anything could faze her but if she was uncomfortable being here . . . he knows from obvious things that her history with men and intimacy of any kind might possibly set her off.

“I don’t have a favorite color,” Natasha blurts out, nails digging into the denim material of her pants, “I don’t think I like music very much. . .at least. . .I don’t have a favorite artist. We weren’t allowed. . . The last person who said he was my friend ended up with a pen in his eye socket when he tried to rape me. I was eleven. And my first kiss was when I was nine years old, after I was kidnapped and brought into the Red Room. The boy was older than me by three years and I didn’t like him. He was much bigger than me but if I didn’t learn how to kiss, bullet to the head. I don’t have many pleasant memories, Clint. So sorry if I can’t give you what you want to hear.”

“Natasha, you didn’t have to. . .this isn’t. . .” Clint licks his lips, suddenly having a hard time forming a coherent sentence, “I didn’t mean it like that. Please, don’t ever feel like you’re obliged to tell me anything about your past. Look. . .Psych offered me your file today.”

“Did you take it?” Natasha asks, waiting for the misuse of trust to sting her like a bee.

“Of course not. I don’t want to see my partner classified under some psychiatric mumbo jumbo. You’re human, not a freak case.”

“Oh…” she utters, as if she disagrees with him.

“Boss man thinks that it’s good if we stick together. SHIELD wants us to be friends but more importantly, _I_ want us to be friends. But I don’t mean in the twisted way that the Red Room ingrained in you. This definition of friends is entirely different.”

“Oh? Define different?” Natasha gives Clint a dual look of suspicion and amusement.

“Different as in it’s a shame you’ve never tried ice cream before and I’m determined to get you to try every flavor until you have a favorite kind. As in you teach me how you throw those knives and I’ll show you how to shoot arrows. As in I don’t hack your file, you don’t hack mine. We _talk_ instead of spy on each other. Different as in maybe we’ll visit this pet shop in East New York where they put these adorable puppies in the front window on Fridays.”

At that, Natasha finds herself sputtering on some of the water she drank, wiping her mouth and giving Clint a bright smile.

“What did I do?” Clint asks, not sure if he should smile back.

“You said ‘adorable’,” Natasha explains, pointing an accusing finger at him as if they’re children in a courtyard proclaiming who has the cooties.

“You called me a sap and an animal lover, my saying the word ‘adorable’ should hardly surprise you,” Clint doesn’t bother defending the adjective, “You’ll see what I mean when you see the puppies.”

Natasha finds herself smiling again before she can stop herself.

“Hey, Nat? How much of my file did you read?” Clint probes, a faint part of him still crushed that she had breached his privacy like that. It doesn’t matter that they’ve only known each other for a few months, privacy is privacy. He’d spared her life hadn’t he? Isn’t there some kind of respect floating between them?

“Just the general things,” she answers, “Name, date of birth, hometown, your clearance level, and specified skills. Your file is thicker than mine it wouldn’t have been long before they caught on to me.”

“So you don’t know about. . .” Clint sighs, somehow relieved, “Natasha it’s against protocol to hack the SHIELD database. And it’s especially wrong to invade other people’s privacy, especially your partner’s.”

How private can it be if it’s on the SHIELD database? Natasha thinks for a moment but when she sees how serious Clint feels about what she did, she pushes that thought away. Somehow she feels like she did something wrong. Well, it was obviously the wrong thing to do.

“Sorry,” she admits in a low voice. He grunts in acknowledgement.

Silence falls a second time. Natasha reaches out to gather the apple skins and dumps it along with the apple in the metal pail. Sitting back down, she meets Clint’s eyes and bites her bottom lip in concentration. What a strange man, she thinks. He actually trusts her enough to let her into his apartment. She brought two knives and a handgun into his place and he didn’t bat an eye. She just confessed to reading his file- well a portion of it, and he didn’t even throw her out his apartment. Not that he could, of course. She’d slit his throat before he could lay a hand on her but the thing is, Natasha senses- as much as she makes the conscious effort not to trust this man- that he has zero intentions of harming her. It’s very unlike her to even think of being his ally, his “friend” and it pushes her back into the Black Widow but pulls her into Natasha Romanoff at the same time. Sometimes she feels as if she’s being split in two.

She blinks at him instead of smiling and Clint’s SHIELD phone vibrates.

  
They hadn’t given Natasha one since she wasn’t officially SHIELD and was henceforth placed under Clint’s care. Where he went, she had to tag along, albeit for missions since she hadn’t been cleared yet. She usually meandered onto the shooting range or sat alone in the cafeteria or in her quarters when he was away.

Clint assured her that by month seven, she’d be an official SHIELD member if she proved herself fast enough. And that having a SHIELD phone was just an easier way for SHIELD to keep track of you.

“Barton,” Clint answers in a professional and eerily robotic tone of voice. He gives two hums of acknowledgment and a ‘yes sir’ before clicking end call. The way his jaw is set gives away his aggravation.

“Who was it?”

“It was Fury. He wants me to come in to supervise some new junior agents. Which means you’ve gotta tag along. Sorry, Nat.”

Natasha nods singularly, realizing with a hint of sadness that their little apple and water break has come to its end.

“Don’t apologize. I’ll get my things.”


	2. Year One

Y E A R   O N E

 

A year passes. Natasha earns her official SHIELD badge within six months. She soars through every course with flying colors. The training requirements here are merely child’s play in comparison to the brutality of the regimen enforced on her in the Red Room. Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division explicitly covered every section of its name. They’d covered everything from extracting bullet wounds (which she already knew how to do) to ingredients for apple pie (something about undercover housewife ops). At least it’s better than what they had her doing back in Volgograd.

She is starting as a level four agent. Clint is a level seven. Director Fury, a man who is just as guarded around her as she is around him, told her she had to remain at SHIELD for another year before she was promoted. The ranking itself is an insult to Natasha’s skills but protocol is protocol and the need to deviate hasn’t arisen yet.

Unlike her, Clint has the privilege of doing solo ops, waiting in a window in some clay building to take out some trigger-happy terrorist and of course leading squadrons during missions. He is the venerable Hawkeye and everyone wants to be on his team. But he too has to be pulled down to below-level ops on occasion because Fury likes how efficient Hawkeye and the Black Widow are together. They get paired together for level four operations only which isn’t as often as Romanoff would like. The ops are not as action-packed as the soviet assassin hoped. It’s mostly recon work and Clint is usually there to supervise. When things go wrong (which Natasha sometimes hopes happens just for the sake of getting some good kicks in) they send in Clint and the ops end with bullets and arrows a-blazing.

And it’s not that Natasha is needy or dependent. She once spent an entire month in a windowless room with concrete walls, a narrow concrete bed, a dysfunctional toilet, and watery flavorless oatmeal (at least she thinks it was oatmeal) for companionship. She’s more than capable of living- no thriving on her own in foreign worlds. She adapted a flawless American accent from her strict linguistics training back in Volgograd. Her English is without fault. She managed not to shoot the first agent who commented about her ass when she walked through the hallway on week 4 at SHIELD. There are some things she can work on (she has a very dark humor according to Clint who is one to talk) but for the most part, she’s made herself entirely infallible.

But she finds that she likes Clint Barton a lot. He’s so much like her, driven, malleable like metal when heated but coarse like uncut diamonds. His company is a relief and his companionship makes her feel less mechanical and more like she has a soul, like there’s an actual heart beating inside of her. So no, she’s far from needy but she also realizes how complacent she has found herself with him. His presence designates itself into her life like a snug little puzzle piece. He’s become a part of her whether she’ll ever admit it or not. Barton is a good man and a trustworthy person. And for reasons beyond anything Natasha can fathom, he is forgiving and patient with her. She breaks a lot of rules knowingly and unknowingly and he barely slaps her wrist. He warns her of her transgressions and keeps it moving.

He never treats her like a child. He treats her like he knows she’s a world-renowned assassin who can take down nations with the wink of an eye. He treats her with respect, like a teammate, a soldier, nothing less.

The other idiots at SHIELD don’t know better. They either joke around when she’s in the room or they keep their distance for fear of having their necks snapped for no reason in particular. Typically it’s the latter.

As her first year at SHIELD nears its completion Natasha Romanoff finds herself devoting more and more time to Clint. They train together, exchange weaponry from time to time to strengthen their weaknesses, and they spar for hours on end, where the other junior agents bark demeaning comments at Barton for being less of a man by having his tail handed to him by the Widow. They’re mostly irrelevant and as far as Natasha knows, he’s unaffected by her martial superiority.  
They both like the sting in their muscles and the strain in their lungs when they go overboard with it. It’s not even a matter of trying to prove whose better. Everyone knows that Natasha can and does best Clint in the hand-to-hand department (long-distance sniping was a whole different division).

They just like the give and take aspect of sparring. They’re both highly skilled, have impressive flexibility (though Natasha wins in the oversplits department) and move together with stunning fluidity. It’s like a dance with grace and technique and some bruises and nosebleeds. Most of the time it’s Barton’s blood that’s being wiped off the sparring mats but on really good days, it’s Natasha’s. They like it. It’s not competition. It’s communication. _It means you have this power and I still trust you. I trust you._ Natasha doesn’t ever think the Red Room could have hoped to find someone to be as compatible with her as Clint is. Through him, she learns new things about herself. Like the fact that she can have capacity beyond the ability to kill.

Clint learns things about Natasha in return as the months go by. How she’s like a sponge with millions of holes eager to absorb. For one, she’s a living encyclopedia. Her knowledge is vast and limitless and she’s as multidimensional as multidimensional can get. She tells Clint one day that she can flicker between personas like changing channels with a remote control. Just to prove it, she comes over to Clint’s apartment one afternoon and puts on this perky sunshine persona that’s so spot-on, it freaks Clint out. He literally begs her to stop and she drops it, slipping back into stoic and calm Natasha Romanoff.

It takes Clint eight months to realize that Natasha’s favorite color is blue- cerulean if you wanted to be exact.

He considers buying her something in that color but another voice tells him that would have been stupid. Natasha would have probably blackened his eye. They’re comfortable in this form of orbit. He’d hate to send her into supernova by doing something overly affectionate. He isn’t sure what he even expected her favorite color would be. Maybe black? But perhaps that’d be too stereotypical, redheaded assassin and all. She is a contradictory human being. He still doesn’t know why he feels so honored to know her favorite color.

It’s no secret that they are joined at the hip. First because Fury ordained it so that Natasha could be under a magnifying glass but eventually because their preference of company mostly narrowed down to each other.

Her presence in his apartment becomes so common that Clint offered her a spare key.

“I don’t need a key to get into this place,” she had boasted.

She proved it one afternoon by sneaking in through the window and spotting Clint stark naked with a toothbrush in his mouth blasting Phoenix’s Lisztomania at full volume. She won’t tell him that she played voyeur for thirty seconds before making her presence known. She’d never seen the tanned archer turn so white until then. She’d filed away that the archer has the most supreme butt in all of existence.

Milestones and mirthful memories alike are made at Clint’s apartment. Between the two assassins, it's where their confidence in each other grows and where their trust becomes like the roots of a tree. For Natasha, it is a constant that she thinks she has never had before. For Clint it is reconstruction of the self that has been long overdue.

They sit together tonight eating chocolate ice cream (Natasha decided it was her favorite flavor) and vodka. Well, Natasha is drinking vodka. Clint isn’t the biggest fan of vodka or any other alcoholic beverage. This Natasha discovered a few months back when she’d offered him a drink and he declined. He had showed her a faded scar he had on his wrist that she spent months pretending not to notice.

“Abusive dad and alcohol,” he explained, face neutral, “I was seven. He did this with a bottle I’d accidentally kicked over. Just barely missed a vein.”

He doesn’t trust himself enough to get wasted. Natasha understands. Something tells her it would upset him if she stopped drinking in front of him on his account so she takes the bottle a pours some in her ice cream before setting it on the table. She knows Clint’s apartment like the fingers on her hands. Everything is where it has always been since she first came in, save for the newer target practice pads on the wall.

“I bet they’re gonna make us partners as soon as you graduate,” Clint says but Natasha shrugs seeing as SHIELD doesn’t seem too keen on promoting the assassin just yet.

“I don’t see why I have to wait so long. I’m better than everyone here. These level five agents are a joke. Williams couldn’t even hold a bomb without pissing his pants. And Michaels thinks that kissing ass is going to get him anywhere,” Natasha grumbles.

“You lack humility, Romanoff,” Clint puts his feet on the glass table and Natasha just tucks hers under her legs, “That’s why you haven’t been promoted.”

“I happen to think I’m a very eager agent, that’s all. I don’t think Fury likes me.” Natasha defends herself, earning a soft grin from the archer.

“You took down a lot of his agents. Some of them were SHIELD’s best. He too has people to answer to, you know. I hear the Council is a mean group of people. They get antsy.”

“I didn’t take you down,” Natasha points the spoon of ice cream in his direction.

“I’m not like the others,” he feigns a prideful grin, “I’m different.”

Natasha pauses for a moment, eyes flickering back and forth between the archer and her chocolate ice cream.

“Yes. You are,” she admits.

Well of course he’s different. His skillset is unprecedented, varied, and near-impossible to contest. He’s the only archer she knows and his trajectory and sniper skills are extraordinary. She’s never met a man who never misses. His hand-to-hand is impeccable she knows that his knowledge of fighting is boundless because of the way he switches styles when they’re sparring. It’s obvious to say that he’s different. His distinction in other ways, his discipline, his respect, his patience with her, well that’s all wrapped up in the complex bundle of a man that he is. He’s remarkable like that.

“Are you giving me a compliment, Romanoff?” Clint gives her an incredulous grin.

“I don’t know,” Natasha smiles back, unadulterated and new, “Do friends give compliments to each other?”

“It’s considered a personable thing to do.”

“Then yes, congratulations Clinton Francis Barton on being different,” Natasha suppresses the somehow inherent urge to laugh. A year she has known this man and still her body has these reactions to him that is so unsettling. Suddenly the inclination to be _happy_ overcomes her. _Happiness_. It’s foreign to the Russian. A stranger she’s never come to know.

“Hey Tasha, just think of it, you and me, officially a team taking down bad guys. We’ll be the dynamic duo of the century. You and your Glocks. Me and my arrows. Hawkeye and the Black Widow. We’ll make people pee in their pants,” Clint goes on a ramble, “Well I bet you’ve already made men literally piss their pants but now it’ll be twice as bad. We’ll be unstoppable.”

“I’m already unstoppable,” Natasha teases.

“Yeah but together we’ll be like magic. They won’t know what hit them. Those small ops are nothing compared to the missions they’ll send us on once we’re officially paired up,” Clint promises, watching the playful glint in Natasha’s eyes as she watches him get thrilled over working with her.

“You mean _if_.”

“I mean _when_. It’s the only logical choice,” Clint swallows three spoonfuls of ice cream, “We’ll be a legend around the Triskelion.”

“You’re really set on us working together,” Natasha says thoughtfully. She stares at Clint waiting for him to answer.

The archer nudges her shoulder, a simple smile on his lips.

“I take it a woman of your caliber is likely to disagree but it’s actually great having a partner. You know, someone who watches your back, someone who you can connect with, a person you trust. Someone who _knows_ you, knows your tells, knows when and when not to break protocol for your safety.”

“I don’t know you very well.”

“And yet here you are sitting on my couch eating chocolate ice cream and vodka,” Clint says, this time pointing his spoon at her, “You know more about me than I know about you.”

“SHIELD has a file on me,” Natasha reasons.

“I never touched it,” Clint promises, “Not once. All I need to know about you should come only from you. So tell me, Nat. We’ve known each other a year. Your favorite color is cerulean but you hardly own a thing in that color. You like chocolate ice cream. I know you’re a leftie just like me. Your hair is naturally curly but not like this. Your natural curls are like ringlets. I love it. A lot of people think your eyes are blue but up close they’re actually green. I know that you know that Agent Gonzales has been badmouthing you behind your back since you got here but you could give two damns. But I especially know that you have a deep dark past that you’d rather not dwell on. But here we are, a year into this. . .friendship. And you’ve yet to tell me real things about your past, about who you truly are.”

“You say it like you’re my therapist,” Natasha’s brows just barely crease, “I thought that Doctor Schaeffer down at Psych took care of those things.”

“You’ve yet to actually report to her, Tasha,” Clint retorts and when Natasha’s eyes flicker with fire he adds, “And no, I haven’t been looking into your visits. Boss man felt the need to tell me that you’re being uncooperative with the psych teams. You’ve made no contact at all.”

“I don’t need deprogramming. I’m not going around shooting my superiors, am I? No. I can mostly differentiate what’s right and wrong. I have choices now and that’s that. I’m _fine_. I’ve defected, I’m on SHIELD’s team, and everything is fine the way it is. They don’t need to get into my head,” Natasha defends herself. She is now unsure of how or why this conversation took such a negative (or serious) turn, “There’s nothing for them to see.”

“Tash, it’s part of protocol to be psychologically evaluated regularly and cleared for duty, whether it’s field or training duties. SHIELD doesn’t mess around with the stability of their agents. They’ll off you if they consider you a dangerous threat.”

“They can try,” Natasha scoffs, eating another spoonful. Her body language reverts into something defensive. She’s stiff now and Clint notices.

 _ **They have**_ , he thinks, _**when they sent me after you. I had a clear shot. You only saw me because I let you see me**_.

He gets the idea that her refusal to visit psych has a lot to do with the things that went on in the Red Room. He isn’t an idiot. He knows a screwed up mind when he sees one. He can see the missing pieces- things that have been taken away from her and never returned. She may be multidimensional but Clint’s no fool. He can see right through the little things. It’s just a matter of her trusting him enough to act upon his observations. Against his better judgment he presses his hand to her shoulder, slowly so as not to startle her.

“You don’t have to let them in, Nat. I’m not asking you to do that,” there is a painful sincerity to Clint’s voice, that makes Natasha wince noticeably, “You just talk to me, if anything. Just talk to me. Say something. Anything. First thing that comes off the top of your head.”

“I think I was married before,” Natasha confesses. She frowns a moment later, face twitching as she wonders why she even said that. Of all the things she could have brought up. _Stupid_.

“Oh yeah?” Clint is taken aback. He’d expected something, but not that, “What was his name?”

Natasha’s lips tighten. She puts her spoon back into the glass bowl and relaxes against the couch. Shutting her eyes, she takes a deep breath.

“Alexei Shostakov. He was a member of the Red Room. I…I was young when they wed us but…they said he died. I don’t even know if it’s true. He’s like a dream,” Natasha admits, feeling like she said more than she should have. Her heart pulses hard in her throat.

“Was he kind to you?” Clint inquires, watching how her face hardens.

“I don’t know,” Natasha replies quickly, “I think so. I don’t know. Like I said, he’s like a dream. The psychologists in the Red Room, they played with my brain. They liked to put memories in and take others out. Make you their puppet. I think they got off on doing that to me. Strapping me down to a table, injecting me with needles, latex gloves pressing into my body… I don’t truly know what’s real. I don’t know if his caresses or kisses were genuine. I think I loved him. But how can I know love if he is neither fictitious nor authentic? Are they dreams or repressed memories? There is no way for me to know. I just move on.”

Clint swallows a heavy gulp, studying the Russian’s face. He can see how she’s struggling with herself. He makes a mental note to avoid mentioning this Alexei Shostakov in the future. He’d run a search on the name but Natasha probably wouldn’t appreciate the deed. Her problems run deeper than he’d thought. A dead-maybe-not-real-husband does sounds like a hell of a lump to sleep on at night. She looks upset now. Her arms are wrapped tightly around her torso even though it’s considerably warm inside the apartment. Her green eyes are now set upon the archer, wordlessly petitioning him to drop the subject.

“I was married once,” the Clint confesses before she could go entirely frigid, “She’s actually a SHIELD agent but she’s in a separate department.” He believes he owes her the confession since she reached so far down into herself to tell him that.

Natasha quirks an eyebrow at the admission.

“Who is she?”

“Agent Barbara Morse. Everyone calls her Bobbi. I honestly don’t know why,” Clint chuckles to himself, “She’s very beautiful, blonde, tall. Taller than me actually,” he laughs again, “She’s a genius, she's into science, computers, the whole shebang. She performs exceedingly well in martial arts. She’s handed my tail to me a few times actually. And she was the longest relationship I’ve been in. Two years we were married. We dated for six months prior. It was a whirlwind thing, I guess. When it came down to it, we really had two or three things in common- we both work for SHIELD, we both love sex, and we both have avian-related codenames.”

“Why did you stay together for two years if you had so little in common?” Natasha frowns.

“Dunno,” Clint shrugs, “Companionship. Loyalty. Hope. I thought I could fix what honestly was never broken, just not meant to be together. The marriage was like trying to fit a big puzzle piece into a really small place. She showed up on Valentine’s Day three years ago with court-ordained divorce papers. I signed it without even arguing. I don’t like fighting, you know? I’ve seen what it can do to any warm-blooded man.”

“Did you love her?” Natasha sits up, eating her ice cream, which is now runny like a milkshake. She isn’t surprised that he was married before. And while he doesn’t have the handsomest face, he exudes the qualities of a lady’s man; Flirty but never actually initiating anything if you didn’t ask. He doesn't seem like he's into flings.

Clint doesn’t answer. He gets up to put his empty bowl of ice cream in the sink before plopping back down onto the sofa. He sighs. What he and Bobbi had was er- complicated, for lack of a better term. Things got ugly in their own ways. They’d gone through trauma in their marriage and it just had to end. There was no reason to try to fix what didn't belong together. Yes, complicated was the right word. Even more complicated than the wary assassin sitting next to him looking at him like she’s never seen his face before. Bobbi’s in the past and she’s moved on to some new guy named Luke or Lionel or Lance or something. She’s healthy, she’s happy, she’s moved on, and he’s moved on. He’d rather not dwell that much on his mistakes.

“You wanna watch tv?” Clint offers as recompense, reaching for the remote.

Natasha shakes her head.

“I like talking. Television is a distraction. And there’s nothing good on tv anyways. Talking to you is better than wasting neurons on other people’s tawdry showbiz success.”

“Another compliment,” Clint grins, sitting back. He feels the tension in the air finally subsiding. Maybe they can both breathe at last. He places an arm across the side of the couch, almost but not quite touching Natasha’s shoulder. His face turns serious. “Now, that wasn't so bad, was it? Getting some things off your chest? It's important for you to trust me with yourself, Nat. Otherwise, what's the point in us working together? More importantly, what's the point in freedom if you can't have trust? I understand that was difficult for you. But with the dangerous lives we lead, nothing comes without difficulty. So thanks for sharing that with me.”

“Thank you for being my friend,” Natasha returns. **_But you have no idea how difficult that was._**

“Do you like being my friend?” Clint asks sheepishly. _Come on, Barton, what are you, ten?_

“Do _not_ get sappy!” Natasha jabs her elbow into his side. She points a finger his way, “I will leave right now if you get sappy, Clint. I didn't sign up for sappy Barton.”

“I yield, I yield,” Clint chuckles, raising his arms defensively, “So you’re serious about no tv? I’m kind of a couch potato on my off days. There are some great shows that I think you’d enjoy. Or we can watch movies. We have four hours left before we have to head back to the Triskelion. The options are various, Miss Romanoff.”

“Okay,” Natasha sighs, rolling her eyes at the surname, “But none of that reality tv junk I had to sit through in the break room. The other ladies were insistent on it.”

“You’re gonna love what I have to offer then,” Clint turns the television on with the remote and finds Looney Tunes on Demand. It was his favorite show growing up. He and his older brother Barney (the one he had yet to mention to Natasha) used to sit in the kitchen in the mornings letting their cereal go soggy while Porky the Pig did something absurd. He guesses he never grew out of the show.

Now, though, Clint starts to second-guess his decision to put on the classic cartoons. He observes from his peripheral how mechanical Natasha is right now. She's watching the cartoons on the screen with a neutral face. Her eyes don't brighten when the begin credits start. She doesn’t smile, not once. Not even as Wile E. Coyote gets crushed by an anvil for the umpteenth time. Her eyebrows crease together every now and then and even her fists clench. But her face remains unbetraying as colors flash across her skin. She’s trying to hide the fact that she’s struggling. Clint’s seen this kind of behavior before, in children in foster homes that he stayed in.

 _She’s unfamiliar with cartoons, idiot_.

Clint finds his face hardening when he considers the fact that Natalia Alianova Romanova has never watched cartoons a day of her life. Her childhood (nightmare) didn’t consist of a single happy memory. She holds not an ounce of innocence to draw on as she sits here entirely unfamiliar with the concept of cartoons. Anger begins to rise but Clint clamps down on it before she can notice. She may possess all the knowledge in the world- able to hack systems like she was nursed on computers, knowing how to kill someone in two hundred different ways without using a weapon, being trained in every combat known to man.

But take that all away and who is Natasha Romanoff?

He wonders if he'll ever find out.


	3. Year One Month Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha deals with Psych and in turn faces her past through Clint.

 

Y E A R  O N E  M O N T H  T H R E E 

 

 

“Good afternoon, Natasha Romanoff. Is it okay if I call you ‘Miss Romanoff’?”

“Agent Romanoff is fine,” Natasha places a stoic look on her face. The sternness that mixes into her voice is intentional. She’d been waiting in the Psych department for ten minutes. Her doctor was incapacitated with another agent that had gone overtime.

“I’m Doctor Relia Schaeffer,” the dark haired woman offers a hand with dry crinkly skin to the Russian.

“I know who you are,” Natasha takes the woman’s hand and gives it one shake.

Doctor Schaeffer bears her big white teeth in a smile and tucks her coat under her before sitting down behind her desk.

Natasha’s eyes flicker around the room one last time before going back to the brown skinned woman who is still smiling at her with those ridiculously large teeth.  
The office is very cumbersome, to say the least. The walls are painted dark grey just like the rest of the rooms inside SHIELD. There’s only a floor lamp and a table lamp illuminating the place. Doctor Schaeffer sits behind a broad metal desk where her laptop sits next to a tablet. Her pink pens and yellow pencils are arranged neatly on the table. There’s a thin file sitting on her desk and Natasha’s eyes narrow briefly before she focuses again on her intake. A camera disguised as a clock hangs in the farthest corner of the room and to just tie everything together there are also two picture frames, both of a fluffy Cheshire cat, angled towards Natasha on her desk.

 _Ugh_.

“Thank you for coming. It’s lovely finally meeting you,” Doctor Schaeffer begins. Her voice is light and airy but there is also a hint of condescendence that reminds Natasha of a villain in a story she read months ago. “Nick Fury was very insistent that you attend these evaluations. As you know, Psych assessments are considered a major priority here at SHIELD. The stability of our agents is an utmost concern. We can’t go around having emotionally disturbed agents handling guns now can we?” And at that, Doctor Schaeffer cackles like she told the joke of the century. Natasha wonders if therapists have therapists.

“Is that what you think?” her eyebrows crease just as she speaks, “That I’m emotionally disturbed? Try I could take this silly pink pen right now and stab you through both eye sockets. And I’d walk out of here like it was nothing, as if I just swatted some fly. Now, I only say this because I know you have a digital copy of my file on your devices and the hard copy is sitting right there on your desk. I’m telling myself that you didn’t put it there to taunt me because you wouldn’t be so imprudent. You put it there to show me that you did extensive reading on my file and so nothing I say will surprise you. You’re telling me I have freedom to say what I want.”

Doctor Schaeffer nods approvingly. She’s unfazed. Natasha knows she won’t trust this woman. She’s just too kind and too relaxed. It’s like she planned this game out beforehand and anticipates her every move. Natasha’s experiences with people trying to get into her head have never ended well. Especially when those said people were holding you captive and brainwashing you for the hell of it.

“That was a very good assessment, Agent Romanoff. It is vital that you understand that I am here to help you.” Lies. “And if we are to get through this promptly I require that you be one hundred percent honest with me. Trust is a key variable in this instance. I hope you’re willing to trust me and accept whatever advice I have to offer. Well, I believe I’ve said all I needed to say. Let’s get into this shall we? Do you know why you are being assessed?” the doctor folds her hands on top of Natasha’s file.

“Didn’t you just tell me that?” Natasha retorts.

“Well besides an assessment of your emotional well-being, your peak performances in the field qualify you for a higher SHIELD level. Your superiors have been watching you very closely and are eager for your advancements in this organization.” Oh is that what we’re calling it? “However, you cannot graduate until you’re cleared by one of SHIELD’s Psych doctors. Needless to say, your skills will be of greater use if you are bumped up. And I’m sure every little mission you’re sent on must be slighting your capabilities. You’re a resourceful woman and based on your file, you’ve done more for less. I’d like to question your moral orientation, if you don’t mind. So, first things first, how do you like working for SHIELD?”

“Ah, what’s not to like? Quality mashed potatoes from the mess hall, the floors are swept, the toilets are cleaned,” Natasha answers sardonically. She imagines Clint would have responded the same way, all sarcastic and bitter, “The paycheck is substantial, and my SHIELD quarters are satisfactory.”

The way the therapist passively smiles and sits back rings all the bells in her head. _Remember, she is not on your side. Her job is to prove her credibility by assessing the Black Widow and clearing you for duty. She is SHIELD property. She is not your ally. Or your friend._

“And what of the fellow agents on your level? How have they been treating you since your defection to SHIELD?”

“It’s like I’m an atom bomb,” Natasha says honestly, “And I’ll explode if any of them breathe near me.”

“I can’t imagine that feels very welcoming,” Doctor Schaeffer says. Your observational skills are astounding.

“I never asked for a Welcome to Your First Day party, did I? This is an espionage and intelligence agency, not a paper making company. Professionalism here is separate from the way it is outside, where chivalry is expected. The agents maintain their distance and that is perfectly acceptable to me. It’s not their approval I’m concerned with.”

“Oh?” Doctor Schaeffer raises her eyebrows, “And whose approval is it that you seek? Director Fury’s?”

Natasha chooses not to answer. She won’t admit even to herself who’s approval she inadvertently seeks. It isn’t even a longing kind of approval, like the way a dog brings a ball back to its owner. It’s more of a see I can do good approval. Her long red hair is pulled back into a low tight ponytail and she now wishes that she left it loose so she could have an excuse to tuck her hair behind her ear. She consciously reminds herself not to fidget, not to give big-toothed Doctor Schaeffer a reason to pull out a notepad and write things down.

She has to remind herself yet again why she finally reported to Psych. Clint had been pleading with her all month to just go to Psych at least once to get Fury off of his back. She knew she’d regret doing the him this good deed, even if it would supposedly benefit her in the end. Clint is actually in Belize on a mission right now. Today he gets back. It’s been two weeks and Natasha would slit a throat to trade places with him. Instead, she’s sitting across from a pretentious woman with a degree in psychology who feigns more knowledge than what she has.

“It isn’t healthy to work for someone else’s praise you know. It defeats the purpose of making choices. It makes purpose itself a vacuous concept. It’s not really your own decision if it’s for someone else and not for yourself.”

“Approval and praise are two different things, just as a nice person is separate from a good person,” Natasha returns in an equally condescending tone. Still concerned about my moral code?

Doctor Schaeffer hums thoughtfully before taking a peek inside of the manila folder marked “Operation Black Widow” in bold black ink. Natasha tries not to give away any reaction but she can’t help swallowing the boulder inside her throat. She knows exactly what’s inside that folder. She’s more concerned about what this doctor intends on pulling from the folder to interrogate her on.

“What was the Red Room like?”

“I don’t remember,” Natasha’s reply is sharp. It’s an absurd response but not entirely a lie. Every time she returned to her captors after completing a mission she felt as though her mind had been reset. It was as if there was something in the air that said ‘you don’t know what this place is, only that you belong here’. The Red Room gave off a hair-raising foreboding sensation. It was nothing like what a home should feel like. But it was the only home she was allowed to know. A place where your allegiance to a ruthless criminal organization was forced on you. A place where they put knives in her seven year-old hand. A place where she didn’t know who she was, only knowing who she served, being unmade and remade so often that she never actually recognized herself when she looked in a mirror.

If Hell were a real place and Natasha had to choose between the Red Room and eternal fire- she’d pick Hell as if it were a bucket of water in a desert.

  
“Try to remember the insignificant things,” Doctor Schaeffer speaks in that sickening motherly tone, “How did it smell, what sound did your feet make when you walked on the ground, was your mattress soft or hard? Did the hallways echo? Were the bathrooms cold? Our surroundings can bring up repressed incidents from our past. Like the way the smell of pie might remind someone of their childhood. Draw from sensation or muscle memory.”

“I’d very much rather not do that,” Natasha almost growls. The only sensation she could possibly draw from was fear, hostility, and the smell of bleach when she reached her corridors. As if someone’s blood was always being wiped up every few hours.

“What about your teachings?” the doctor changes her question, “What were the inculcations there?”

“You have my file, see for yourself,” she doesn’t mean to sound this clipped but honestly if that’s what Doctor Schaeffer was aiming for then she’d certainly get it.

“I want you to tell me yourself. This is about you, not me,” the therapist’s smile is tender. Her words are sharp though.

“Compliance, obedience, murder, remorselessness. You get the general gist,” the Russian feels the fight-or-flight response creeping into her veins. Betray nothing to her, she is not your ally. She has no right to know anything you don’t need her to.

“You were brainwashed,” Doctor Schaeffer reads from the folder. Natasha picks up on the incredulity on Schaeffer’s voice at her nonchalance.

“’Brainwashed’ is a very broad term for what they did to me.”

“It also says here that you experienced you experienced ‘premature sexualization’,” Doctor Schaeffer continues to read, looking up while her head faced downwards.

At that Natasha throws her head back and laughs. It’s not a joyful laugh. The therapist squirms uncomfortably in her seat.

“Is that what they’re calling it these days? Premature sexualization? Call it what it is, doctor. It was rape and in some cases, forced mating,” Natasha states icily, “Seduction was a requirement of my training. Just imagine how they’d teach a fourteen year old how to have sex.”

“And how do you feel about what happened to you?”

“Doctor Schaeffer,” Natasha leans forward, heart racing against her SHIELD uniform. She’s had enough of this interrogatory bullshit. There are certain memories that she never wants to access ever again. This is one of them. She lets just enough of the Black Widow snuggle into her mask, “This is my first meeting with you. Surely you don’t expect me to spill my guts when you have all that you need to know right there in that folder. We are wasting time, my time. Why don’t you put your credentials to use and ask me something you don’t already know? Because I could be training right now. This is an inconvenience.”

Doctor Schaeffer sits back as Natasha leans forward. She tries to maintain her impassive front but the assassin can make out the slight hand tremors when she closes the Black Widow file and slides it underneath her tablet.

“Okay, I can acquiesce to that. Why don’t you tell me why you decided to join SHIELD? You were under orders to take out someone who eluded our SHEILD agents for years. When Agent Barton was sent on your trail, you carried out the murder of someone who was at the top of our hitlist. Vas-Vassi-” the doctor begins fumbling over the foreign pronunciation.

“Vassily Ilyich Ulyanov,” Natasha finishes impatiently. She had her personal reasons for getting rid of him; it had nothing to do with getting involved with SHIELD. The man just happened to be on their list, she comprehends, “His murder is what got me on SHIELD’s radar in the first place. Agent Barton informed me of this.”

“He was ordered to take you out, Agent Romanoff. Placing myself in the sniper’s shoes, he was watching you from a long distance. He had all the information on you- the kill list, where you came from, your espionage skills. From his initial point of view, you’re a stone cold murderer. He had a clear shot. Agent Barton is the best, after all. He never disobeyed a kill order before you.”

Natasha just smirks and lets the doctor continue speaking about something she truly has no idea of.

“He must have seen you do something, something that changed his mind,” Doctor Schaeffer raises her eyebrows inquisitively at Natasha, “Do you know what it was?”

“It’s in the file.”

_I was vulnerable. I slaughtered children. It was my first time being away from the Red Room for so long. I was unstable. He saw me curled up on myself retching onto the pavement and bawling like an animal. I was trembling, experiencing remorse, an overwhelming urge to bang my head against the pavement until my brain bled from my ears. I held no pride. Only disgrace. It was then that I had realized that I was a monster, not a soldier. A slave to uncleanliness. There was no part of me worth saving. I am a murderer. I am unsure of what Clint Barton saw in me, if that’s what you mean. That’s what’s not in the file._

“Agent Barton was very brief during that portion of the report. It said he couldn’t comply with Fury’s orders and brought you in as a defect who surrendered and agreed to work for SHIELD. How did you manage to convince him to spare your life?”

“Maybe he’s afraid to hit girls,” Natasha replies bitingly.

“He’s killed women before in service,” Doctor Schaeffer’s response is accusing, “Evil comes in all shapes sizes and forms.”

“Shouldn’t you be asking Agent Barton this? I can’t read minds. How am I to know what went through his head when he decided not to neutralize me? I don’t feel the need to ask. For an organization so protective of their agents you certainly lack trust in them,” Natasha accuses, “And for the record, I did not seduce Agent Barton since I detect that’s where you’re getting at. Barton made a different choice, it wasn’t mine.”

“It was your choice to make as an eventuality, Romanoff. One of you would have to die or you’d both come out alive. Based on your combat skills assessment, you and Barton are considerably matched.” _When did this become an interrogation? I don’t like where this is going._

“He presented an alternative, I accepted, I’m here now. Question answered.” the assassin sits rigidly in her seat now. She’s grown agitated with this ‘session’. Her eyes glance a second time to the camera camouflaged as a clock before going back to the shrink. She’s sure Director Fury is the one watching her right now. He’s probably perched against his desk waiting for any signs of failure so he can give the kill order. She doesn't handle being scrutinized well. At least here she knows most of the variables.

“What’s your relationship like with Agent Barton? You are well acquainted with each each other right? You have been assigned to him since your defection so you’ve clearly been spending much of your training time with him. I imagine you must feel gratitude towards Agent Barton for not taking your life and bringing you into SHIELD instead.”

Natasha was speculating when she’d finally get around to asking her that. It must have been gnawing at the woman. The question of the century- are Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff sleeping together? Natasha is no fool. She recognizes the way the people at SHIELD look at them when they’re sparring or eating together in the cafeteria - eyeing them for any confirmation that they’re screwing each other. It’s a childish stereotype that a male and female can’t respectfully coexist without banging their brains out. Clint’s never made any sexual advances on Natasha. His touches are always friendly and never linger longer than necessary. She’s never caught him drooling at her cleavage or her ass. How do you say “every week we hang out at his apartment and watch Looney Tunes or we just sit on his couch and talk about the darkest parts of our life while he offers something obscene to eat like apples or ice cream” nonchalantly?

“Strictly professional,” the assassin responds, “In the field and out.” Natasha can tell that the doctor expects her to elaborate but she doesn’t. She could ramble on and on about everything else, but Clint Barton is off limits. She won’t bring Hawkeye into this because he’s not here to defend himself. Against what, god knows, but she doesn’t want to betray him, even if it’s on accident. The deflection to answer the questions involving Clint is obvious in this case but Natasha can’t bring herself to care. She maintains her silence until the shrink scratches her neck in agitation.

“Fair enough,” Doctor Schaeffer finally gives up, “I just would like to say one last thing before we conclude this session. SHIELD is a good place. I can recognize that given your past, you are leery towards intelligence agencies and authority figures in general. You’ve been with us for over a year now and you’re a Level Four. Even though you haven’t been compliant with SHIELD’s mandatory evaluation policies until today, I am eager to see you graduate to a more appropriate level. That being said, I hope you’ll return here when you’re summoned in the near future. We do feel you are an important and significant asset to SHIELD.”

 _Us. We._ Natasha hates the way she says that. She makes it sound like SHIELD is a book club or a bicycle gang and not a morally ambiguous organization that seems to do more good than harm. SHIELD doesn’t view her as an asset. She’s their machine gun. It’s usage, not comradeship.

The legs on the chair make an ugly sound on the concrete ground as she stands up abruptly.

“Will that be all, Doctor?”

“Yes, Agent Romanoff. That will be all. I will let you know whether you’ve passed the evaluation next week. Thank you for your time,” the doctor reaches into her drawer to pull out a notepad as Natasha turns away to get the door.

“Doctor Schaeffer?”

“Yes, Agent Romanoff?”

“Don’t bother pretending to write down notes that you can look over later when you can just rewind the footage.”

The door slams behind her and her heels echo down the halls.

She doesn’t know what Doctor Schaeffer got out of this meeting. She wanted to gauge her moral orientation. If she’s wise, she’d stamp TERMINATE right on Natasha’s folder. God knows it’s what Romanoff would have done if she were in that position.

_Bzzzzz_

Natasha reaches inside of her pocket to pull out her SHIELD cell. It’s a text from Clint.

**Just got back. Belize was a cakewalk. Successfully evaded Medic ward.- C**

**Where are you now- N**

**Garage. On my way to apartment. Come with?- C**

**Sure- N**

**Did you go to Psych- C**

**Yes – N**

**Aw you did that for me? –C**

**I’m going to kill you- N**

**I hope you don’t mean that- C**

A small smile tugs the corners of her mouth when she slides her phone back into her pocket. Clint has a habit of avoidance when it comes to two things- his exes and his medical examinations. It’s far from typical for the archer to return from his assignments banged up in various locations. There was that one time when Clint had invited Natasha over and had asked her to help stitch up a wide but shallow cut on his abdomen. She connected his medical negligence to the fact that he was a circus boy.

The whole “I joined this circus when I was a kid” thing sounded like an evasive fabrication but the way he moves says it all. It’s all in his technique when he shoots his arrows. He’s always performing for no crowd in particular, even when it’s simply him and the targets on the range. Even in his love of heights, as if he was born walking tightropes and swinging across the sky on trapezes. It’s clear in the way he has acrobatic grace, how gorgeous his upper-body strength is, how fluid he moves.

Even though she’ll never admit it, Natasha _loves_ the way he moves. He’s an extreme energy cocooned in a man’s body.

Clint is leaning against his beloved black Sedan (“This is a sweet ride, Nat. Handles like a dancer.”) with a small grin. The car is ugly in her opinion. He doesn’t even look like a Sedan kind of guy. But Clint is more than fond of it so she tolerates the vehicle. Natasha’s heart is a relentless tempo against her chest; she’s still sensitive (angry-upset-scared-triggered?) from her visit with Doctor Schaeffer. She feels as though she opened old wounds that are having a hard time closing on their own. Clint drops his smile when she doesn’t return it.

“Everything okay?” Clint opens the door on Natasha’s side and catches her glaring at him.

“Why would you ask such a question?” Natasha feigns ignorance, locking herself beneath the seatbelt. She doesn’t spare a glance his way. She just nestles her face into the small space between the seat and the window and listens to the engine rumble as he backs out of the parking spot.

“You’re upset,” Clint starts.

“How was Belize?” She’s deflecting again. She doesn’t care.

“I told you. It was a cakewalk.”

“You’re injured.” Natasha regards his stiff form.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Clint shrugs in that boyish manner that he does.

“I don’t believe in that.” It’s the last thing the assassin says during the drive to Barton’s apartment. Traffic is thankfully minimal, they get there in no time. Mr. Nabiha, Clint’s landlord with the twelve year old daughter that Clint had to drive to school once to make up for late rent payment, regards Natasha with a huge smile on his face. He gives Clint the same approving nod he always does and Clint reciprocates the gesture.

When they get inside the apartment, Natasha hooks her coat onto the coatrack behind the door while Clint heads into his kitchen to make them some sandwiches.

“I’ve got pastrami and bologna. Take your pick,” he calls. Natasha can see the limp in his step. If he’s sporting busted knee, he’s a little more than banged up. If he wants to go ahead and walk on his bum knee then so be it. She’s not his nurse, she won’t stop him. Idiot.

“I’ll take bologna.” Natasha leans against the wall with patient eyes as she watches the archer prepare the sandwiches. She’s not actually hungry but for some strange reason she never turns down food when she’s here in his space. Clint slabs thick layers of mayonnaise all across his bread slices, sticks three pieces of pastrami on it, and grabs some lettuce from a bag of salad he bought from the grocery store on the way to the apartment. He doesn’t put mayonnaise on Natasha’s bread. He already knows she disapproves of the (“artery clogging junk”) flavor. She’s pleased by his thoughtfulness.

“You remembered,” Natasha speaks aloud.

“Of course I did,” the archer keeps his back to her, dribbling mustard between the pieces of bologna, cheese, and lettuce before slicing the bread into two clean triangles, “What kind of friend would I be if I forgot?”

And there’s that word again. _Friend_. It resonates in the way a pond ripples or a flower blossoms. Warmth spreads through her and she loses the tension that kept her posture rigid for so long. _I imagine you must feel gratitude towards Agent Barton for not taking your life and bringing you into SHIELD instead_ , Doctor Schaeffer’s words pound in the back of Natasha’s mind. She would never use the word grateful to describe what she feels for Clint. Life and death is a heads-or-tails game; a luxury. There is only so much of a choice you have when a simple headshot can put you out forever. Freedom, trust, humanity, that is the real prize she has gotten out of this. She is indebted to him.

Why is she even getting so caught up in these notions because of a damn sandwich? Oh yes, that’s right. Because she’s allowed him to get close enough to her that he even knows her preferences of condiments. Because he slithers into crevices she thought she had filled long ago. It should frighten her. And it’s not that it doesn’t. A year of ‘liberation’ from the Red Room and Natasha still feels the words ‘we have no place in this world’ drilling into the back of her skull. There was a punishment for bonding with the other girls. Attachment was associated with liability. Natasha knows this because she made her first kill when she jabbed her knife into her roommate’s (can that term even be used in her case?) throat when they’d been made to fight to the death after sharing sleeping quarters for a period of time. The other girl was too soft, barely put up a fight.

Natasha Romanoff does _not_ believe in safety. But she feels strangely secure when she’s here. It’s an intimate kind of secure. One where Clint can walk around her with his eyes closed and still know not to step on her toes. She decides not to visualize what her captors would have done if they ever got back to her. If they knew that his own kindness is what's flushing out the toxins of their brainwashing. If they saw her now, genuine and smiling at an archer because he remembered that she doesn’t like mayonnaise. 

“Are you in there?” Clint’s voice wades through her thoughts.

“Just thinking,” the words come out quieter than Natasha intends.

“Take your sandwich, I’m starving,” Clint motions the plate her way and tosses her a can of soda when she sits at the small table by the windows.

Natasha sinks her teeth into the bread, chewing while she watches Clint limping over to her. She raises an eyebrow at the archer who is trying and failing at disguising his injuries. His mouth is a thin line like he’d trying best not to grimace. He breathes out through his nose (pain management) and just barely wheezes as he sits down. The plate clanks loudly on the surface of the table.

“How does the sandwich taste?” Clint asks.

“Like bologna and cheese,” Natasha deadpans, “Why didn’t you go to Medical? You’re badly injured.”

“Hey, did I ever badger you about Medical?”

“You know why I don’t go to Medical unless absolutely necessary,” Natasha answers coolly, biting into the sandwich again. It actually tastes really good but she won’t give him the pleasure of knowing that she finds his sandwich savory.

“You and I both know that I’ve had worse injuries. I’ll just sleep this one out with an ice pack,” Clint shrugs. There’s a gaping hole where he bit a chunk out of his sandwich. “I don’t do Medical. I have a bad history with doctors- or lack thereof.”

“Okay, circus boy,” Natasha teases but Clint tenses up.

“It’s got nothing to do with the circus, Natasha.” his voice sounds callous. That’s new.

Natasha’s face varies between consternated, putt-off, and agitated before swallowing another bite of sandwich. She tells herself not to take it personally.

“How was Psych?” Clint asks, rubbing his brows and clearing the agitation from his voice.“I know it isn’t the easiest thing to do. SHIELD’s regulations can be challenging to cooperate with when you’ve got too many stories to tell and not enough people to trust. But you going there today is a step in the right direction. They really want to promote you to a higher SHIELD ranking.”

“So I was told,” Natasha gulps down some soda, “I don’t believe Doctor Schaeffer was trying to help me, Clint. All I saw was red flags. It was an interrogation, not a psychological evaluation. She asked multiple questions in a random order with no direct aim in particular. I assumed that she’d try to establish a bond of trust first, but everything was just wrong. She even inquired about the Red Room.”

Clint’s eyes follow Natasha’s as she looks to her left to the window.

“What did she want to know?” Clint feels the need to ask. No wonder she was so taut earlier. He knows how she draws in on herself when she reveals things from her past life in Volgograd. No one would ever want to revisit that kind of life, certainly not to a random person. He wonders how many doors Natasha locked herself behind when she was sitting across from Doctor Schaeffer. Clint had done a session or two with her some years ago. He knows that the woman attacks from a passive aggressive angle. She’s too much like the men and women he knew as caretakers when he was living in the orphanage. He had put in a request for a different evaluator after the second visit with her. It seems like Fury knew what he was doing, placing Natasha with Doctor Schaeffer.

Natasha puts her can of soda down, eyes growing steely. “She tried to access my mind through me revealing what went on there. She doesn’t realize how dangerous that is.” Long since untying her hair, the curls sit around Natasha’s shoulders and she finds herself flicking a stray ringlet behind her ear. “She wanted to talk about the rapes.”

Clint’s jaw and fists clench. He swallows.

Natasha had told him about the Red Room’s sordid way of teaching the girls seduction from the time they were young teens- and in Natasha’s case- prepubescent. She had told him how she was smaller than the other girls but her body developed quicker so they started early with her. They praised Natalia Alianova the most, even as they broke her. Clint can’t imagine how it screws with your head to be put on a pedestal even as the people praising you are the ones shredding you apart. But he does know what it’s like to have your innocence ripped from your small meaningless hands and dangled right in front of your face every day. He knows the way being abused as a child can haunt you for the rest of your life.

“She has no right to ask you that,” is all he can offer without swearing and cursing Doctor Schaeffer’s name into the ground, “Don’t give away what you don’t want to.”

“I live by that code already,” Natasha offers a smile to Clint but it’s a stiff and broken one. “She expected me to tell her about how I feel about the things that those men did to me.”

“Natasha…you don’t have to-“

“I can’t trust anyone else with these things, Clint. It’s just you,” the admission is blunt and powerful and unexpected. “I can’t tell anyone else about my baggage. It’s too much. I had it incised into my mind that I would never be my own property. I was neither allowed to think nor feel. How can I say ‘yes, I was raped by men, yes I was forced to mate with the older males’? I won’t tell her how afterwards I would scrub myself until my skin burned, I won’t tell her about the color of the bruises on my body, or how I gathered all the strength I could to be able to walk afterwards because if I revealed any signs of weakness, I would be beaten.”

Clint notes how she stops using word contractions and the barest hint of her Russian accent slips in as she speaks. Goosebumps trail across his skin while Natasha continues.

“She has not earned my trust. She could not even hide the camera she disguised as a clock. She wanted me to revisit my life and did not consider that it could be my undoing, that I might be triggered. What can she say? Yes, I was raped, yes, I have been locked in a room where rats ate at my flesh as punishment for moving too slow on a kill order. I was forced many times to stand in the middle of the Russian cold with no clothes on until I went hypothermic. What do you say to someone who was experimented on while they were awake, someone who was too afraid to scream while she had drugs injected int her body? No matter how many condolences she offers I will never accept them. I will not have anyone feeling sorry for me or pitying me. You do not pity me, do you Clint?” Natasha looks sternly into the archer’s eyes.

“No, I don’t pity you,” Clint answers truthfully. _I revere you. I find strength in you. I find good in you_. He knows he should tell her about his life in the orphanage and that he too dealt with sexual abuse. Somehow though, he can’t open his mouth and the words cling to his throat for dear life. He feels that no matter what he has gone through, it is trivial in comparison to what she has dealt with her entire life.

Natasha breaks eye contact and goes back to her sandwich. She makes an effort to finish it, taking small bites and swallowing them down with her cold soda. The silence is too much like drowning and Natasha needs to break it before she loses her mind.

“So why didn’t you make the kill?” her English is intact this time, traces of any Russian accent completely vanished.

Clint takes a lengthy chug out of his soda before crushing the can and tossing it into the trash without looking. The naturalness in everything he does has a way of taking Natasha by surprise no matter how used to it she think she’s become.

“You want the truth? The omitted truth?”

Natasha nods.

“You were too young, Tasha.”

“I was twenty-one,” Natasha retorts.

“I know, that’s not what I meant,” Clint shakes his head, “No one that young can just happen to be devoid of any remorse or feelings whatsoever. No one is born a killer. Something was stolen from you and that’s all I could see- a robbery. The Black Widow I saw that afternoon in Prague wasn’t the Black Widow that I was debriefed on.”

Clint won’t ever forget the way the chill of the wind was nothing compared to the chill of watching the redheaded assassin kneeling into the pavement. Red hair stark in contrast against her skin, covering her face as the wind whipped but it couldn’t block out her screams or the sounds of emergency vehicles veering past them to get to the hospital that was burning to the ground. Fury called her a robot. But Clint saw humanity, pain, loss. He saw that she deserved a second chance.

"I could not take that shot because of what I saw in you, Tasha. There was a raging autonomous effect to you. I saw that you could be liberated, even if it might cost my life in return. SHIELD was wrong from the beginning and I don’t regret doing what I’ve done.”

“Saving a murderer, you mean,” Natasha interjects. She grips her sandwich warily. “You saw that someone who blew up a hospital was worth saving?”

“You and I both know that you had no way of knowing there were children at the center of the explosion.”

“It’s still my fault.”

“Natasha, you can’t blame yourself for things you’ve done in the past. You were brainwashed, tortured, literally broken into submission. None of those things were your fault. You didn’t know wrong from right, yes from no. You can’t blame a blind man for not knowing the difference between blue and red or a deaf man for not hearing a car honking at him right? It’s the same for you. You can’t hold yourself culpable for being made to do those things. The true criminals are those bastards who did that to you and god knows what else they’ve had the other children do. You already know by now that SHIELD is different. You've done enough ops to know we're the good guys- _ambiguously_.”

“I joined SHIELD because I have a ledger, Clint. There are things that I’ve done that- I need to atone for them. It's like even when I wash my hands I still feel my fingers thick and caked with blood. I have to clear it. I have to do good so that the crimes I’ve committed can be laid to rest. Can you understand that, Clint? Can you understand me?”

“Of course, Natasha. Of course I do.”

So much red, he thinks. It’s ironic. Her red hair, the Red Room, the red widow’s hourglass, her red ledger. The red in her eyes when he found her crouched on the ground and offered her a chance to live. The color of blood is a taunting motif in her life that she couldn’t escape if she even tried. He doesn't pity her, he swears he doesn't. But god does he want to pull her into a tight embrace and take away every bit of her past that haunts her.

Clint finds himself sliding his hand across the table to touch Natasha's. The assassin's sharp green eyes catch his gaze. His touch is warm and his hand, large and calloused and knobby completely covers hers. She has deceitfully tiny hands and he could break her wrist if he tried. She starts to slide her arm back but instead she turns her hand over and clasps his in return. She knows she could break his wrist twice as quickly. _These are what an archer's hands feel like_ , she thinks. Strong, worn from years of use, but beautiful in it's own strange way. Her fingers start to wander across the veins on his hand when the archer says her name.

"Natasha." her eyes dart back to his. "You know you're my best friend right?"

“How can you say these things when you don’t know half the things I’ve done?” Natasha's voice is low, caught between a whisper and a rasp.

“No, maybe I don’t. But I do know this. Nothing you say will ever change the way that I see you. You're still my best friend.” _Don't get sappy, Barton. You know she hates that._

It’s like he’s stabbing her with kindness. And she can't help but bleed everywhere. Bleed all of her history onto his hands while he wipes the blood away and tells her everything is fine, nothing is her fault, that she is a good person. What is even the purpose in him knowing this about her? Why does he offer so much of himself to her when she gives so little? Has she ever been a shoulder to cry on for him? A crutch? A _friend_? Perhaps a year ago she'd still tread lightly around him. Men and kindness don't mix well in her history. There is always an ulterior motive lingering behind them. But Natasha knows for a fact that Clint doesn't want anything from her, never asks anything of her. It is a kindness she feels she has to repay, someway, somehow.

She swallows what feels like her heart climbing in her throat.

“I should get back to my apartment," she breathes.

“Why, you bored?” Clint smiles crookedly.

“Just feeling too exposed," Natasha explains, curt and candid, "I need some space.”

“Want a ride back? I'll just grab my coat-”

“No. I’ll walk. I need to burn some energy. You rest since you're not going to go to Medical.” Natasha stands up, finishing her sandwich and soda. Clint watches wordlessly while she slides her arms into her coat and throws a rueful smile his way.

 _Be careful_. The words die on his tongue when the door closes behind the assassin.

 

* * *

 

 

That night, she dreams of the hospital fire. She dreams of the gasoline filling her nostrils and the ground vibrating from multiple detonations. She dreams of children screaming while they burn in flames. She dreams of the nauseating feeling in her stomach while she pretends to be a terrified civilian, running in zigzags among the other screaming people. She dreams of how she knelt down on the pavement and vomited until her intestines shriveled up. She dreams of a latex gloved hand covering her mouth while the other points a needle towards her throat. **_You have no place in this world._ **

The cold air makes Natasha choke when she gasps out of her sleep. She gets up, gooseflesh forming when she goes into the kitchen to get some water. Sleep never comes easy to the assassin. She feels like someone ran miles and miles across her brain. Finishing her water, she slides back into her bed, texting Clint with trembling fingers.

**Thank you- N**

 

 


	4. Year One Month Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strike Team Delta is born once Doctor Schaeffer clears Natasha on the basis that her psychological training makes it impossible to get anything out of her other than the fact that her training makes her more than qualified for graduation.

 

 

 _Y E A R  O N E  M O N T H  F I V E_

 

Enough lies are fed to Doctor Schaeffer and she slides Natasha Romanoff's files through whichever handler that is willing to put their manhood on the line and oversee the Black Widow. That said handler is Phillip Coulson who Clint has described as more or less a father figure (Okay so maybe he didn't use those exact words but Natasha knows from the way he has talked about him that he holds Coulson in more of a fatherly light than that of authority). It's more than a coincidence that he's Clint's handler as well. Since Natasha was placed under Barton's supervision once he brought her into SHIELD, Coulson was technically always her handler- he was just more a shadow during the time. She considers how much information- sensitive or purely factual- Phil knows about her, or if Clint ever talked to him about her.

Coulson strikes her as the sort who won’t get intimately involved with the agents he supervises but is simultaneously willing to breach barriers if he has to. It's like sitting on a seesaw with him (not that Natasha has ever ridden a seesaw, much less ventured a playground before). Whether she likes it or not, it requires both of them to be at an even balance with each other if she has any future with SHIELD. Coulson's manner is an unnerving kind; he's just barely balding, wears a sleek black suit, and his face is so soft and neutral that when he reached out to shake Natasha's hand for the first time, the pure glints of kindness in his eyes took her by surprise. He is, needless to say, unspecified. This man could give the Red Room psychiatrists a run for their money.

He is a good fit and she knows it.

As of last month's graduation to Level Five, Phil is more than confident that Natasha is eligible for a Strike Team position. It's nonsense to debate her physical qualifications. Natasha is highly trained in espionage, an expert marksman, a master seductress, multilingual, fluent in endless forms of combat, acrobatics, cryptography, and hacking. She comes like a custom made weapon that's every covert government organization's wet dream. These are skills that take years and years (and still they still can't come close to Romanoff's capabilities) to groom in an agent of SHIELD. Her solo field operations have been nothing short of successful and she gets each of them done in exquisite record time.

The only thing that complicates matters is the pressing fact that she needs to be a Level Six in order to be considered to join a Strike Team. Even if she just graduated last month, she still has to prove to Fury himself that she can be assigned. There has never been a single agent in history who climbed as quickly as Natasha did through SHIELD Agent levels. It's strictly unheard of for an agent to be promoted to another level within a _month_.

After he had posed the idea of joining a Strike Team to Natasha, Phil had warned her that other agents are going to get angry. They're going to feel a sense of injustice because of her advancements, and well, lack thereof in their cases.

It starts in whispers.

When Natasha passes through the halls, the mumblings that she gets special treatment, that she might be Clint's plaything, that she might have opened her legs once or twice to get where she's at- she already expected them. She knows Clint's heard them too. Whether he's confronted the allegations or not isn't really a concern to her. Doctor Schaeffer herself had her own ideas about them sleeping together. Clint doesn't have to answer to them. He's never done anything inappropriate- never touches her where she doesn't want to be touched, never makes lewd remarks, never stares. Natasha can confess that she's had some passing thoughts about Clint and his hands that have been built by years of archery. She's more than confident that he's thought about her thighs on more than one occasion. They don't speak of it, though. They don't even have flirtatious banter. It's always smiles and soft laughter and touches of comfort and firm words of reasoning between them. He has been more than a good friend to Natasha. Clint doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, not even to her. If there is any one who will ever initiate things between them, it will be Natasha and Natasha alone.

She doesn't need anyone to come to her defense. Anyone who mutters under their breath but doesn't approach the Russian directly is neither worth her time nor thought. She's been called a slattern in just about every way in her past- occasionally even played the role to extract information. Back in her Red Room days, when her title the Black Widow had become something of an abstract legend across Europe, assumptions that the assassin's credentials barely extended past her looks were always used to her greatest advantage. Her unsuspecting targets were the ones who died choking on their own blood after all. If there is one thing Natasha has learned in life, it's that people will always talk. And eventually they'll eat crow. She will never explain herself to these people. She is the anomaly. It frustrates the other agents- even the ones who leer over at her cleavage or stare down her backside when she's in the gym.

Unlike them, Coulson has bigger plans for Natasha. He's eager for her to do missions that she's been trained for from the time she was seven years old. After weeks of insultingly easy overseas ops, hours of supervising sparring between Romanoff and Barton, and days of begging with Fury, Phil manages to snag a slot for Natasha to take the final Level Six physical eval.

"No one has ever beaten Barton's records. He's held the top score for the last ten years." Phil brags the day Natasha has to go into SHIELD's Sim room for her final physical assessment.

"I'll change that," Natasha smirks.

And true to her word, she flies through the final assessment, finishing fifteen minutes earlier than Clint had done. The archer doesn't hold it against her. In fact, when she comes out of the Simulation Room, Clint is waiting beside Coulson with a smile that reaches his eyes and a hidden thumbs up. Natasha returns the gesture with an unsubtle wink.

If Fury does or doesn’t trust her, he never shows it. He gives her a thin-lipped nod when he shakes her hand officially as Agent Romanoff, Level Six clearance (Clint is still a Level Seven). Natasha gives Fury a good grip when she shakes his hand, clenching her fingers around his tighter than necessary. She's sure he gets what she's saying to him. Natasha doesn’t need him to trust her. As long as he’s giving her the operations, she’ll maintain her level distance. He can count on her to get the job done. Just don't step on her toes and they won't have any disagreements.

 _Strike Team Delta_ , they call them.

Strike Team Delta is a new faction of SHIELD's combat teams created explicitly for Hawkeye and the Black Widow alone. Clint's little predictions about them being partnered up comes to life after Fury puts Natasha through. Coulson is more than pleased to have her onboard and to see her through high level ops that she needed to be working on since last year. It will make for an interesting camaraderie given that Clint has a higher clearance level than Natasha.

"I've seen you in the field," Coulson tells them later that day in his office, "You and Barton are going to make SHIELD history. Strike Team Delta will be the best thing that happened to SHIELD since they put Fury in position. These missions will be unlike those juvenile Level Four assignments. The missions are going to take longer, they'll require intricate tactics that are right up yours and Barton's alley. Even though Barton is one level higher than you, Romanoff, you're both entrusted to treat these missions as classified information only exclusive to Strike Team Delta. That means that whenever we send you out, the only people who will know of your operations are Director Fury, Assistant Director Hill, myself, and you and Barton of course."

"What about an extraction plan?" Clint asks, nudging his shoulder into Natasha's as if he's telling her she should be concerned about this as well.

"Oh," Phil slides into a few more documents into the silver folder, "That's the thing- you don't get an extraction plan."

"What?!" before Clint even moves a leg muscle Natasha clasps a hand on his shoulder to stop him like she has precognition or something. "What kind of bull is that? What good does making an entirely new Strike Team serve if we're getting blown to flesh and bone and need to haul ass?"

"Then that's what you have to do, Barton. You have to haul ass. This isn't like any other Strike Team. No extraction plan is an occupational hazard. You and Romanoff are the best that SHIELD has to offer- that the world has to offer. You shouldn't need an extraction plan. You're supposed to be that good. You will still have solo ops when it's required and only then will you have extractions, but oftentimes you're going to be paired together when the time comes for Strike Team Delta's intervention," Coulson responds coolly. Natasha detects the easy transition he makes from friend to boss. She can tell this isn't the first time he's had to lecture Clint. "Your first dual op will be starting in two days. The mission briefing is in two hours. I'd suggest you two head down to the weapons department first. There are some surprises waiting for both of you. We figured it's time for some upgrades before we deploy you."

Clint gets a new double recurve bow and a more versatile set of arrows that according to the weapons specialists, will 'defy the laws of physics'. It's such a stupid thing to say to an archer who relies of physics to shoot his arrows. The tips are sharper though, the arrows cut through wind like hot butter, and the arrows now (finally) include a grappling hook that's taut enough to support two-to-five people. They also introduce a wider range of sniper guns into Clint's weapons arsenal. Which both Clint and Natasha know isn't going to be used unless absolutely necessary, which means Clint's bow would be useless, and since that's never going to happen...

Natasha finds an upgraded tac suit waiting for her in the weapons department. She doesn't mean to laugh when she sees it for the first time. It’s just all very comic-book like, the idea of having a costume suit that coincides with your name. Before the upgrade, she'd been wearing the standard SHIELD outfit with some insanely shock absorbent Kevlar for field duty. She can’t argue with the fact that the improvements on the new one really suit (pun intended) her needs. It’s an off-black-not-quite-grey catsuit with a deep red hourglass for the Widow on her utility belt. The material is highly resistant to damage, fireproof, and made to stretch accordingly to her flexibility.

Her weapons range widens to SHEILD-issued Glocks, electric gauntlets called Widow's Bites (the moniker is courtesy of Clint Barton), and a diverse set of daggers and flash bombs. The Red Room had conditioned her to make use of her surroundings in combat. Weapons are relative. She can take someone out with a bullet just as swiftly as she can twist someone’s spine with her feet. Everything is a weapon. Her hips, her legs, her lips. If there's anything that SHIELD can guarantee, it's the fact that they send their agents into the field with all the right equipment and fully prepared.

While the draconian programming in the Red Room had instilled discipline and refined craft in Natasha, she can't argue with the fact that SHIELD has better tactical plans. SHIELD considers all the variables while the Red Room gave her a photo, a list of information, and the freedom to proceed in whichever manner her tampered-with mind thought best. It was easier to tear through limbs and slit her target's throat and be rewarded with another day to live. If you failed to complete your mission, they put a bullet in your mouth. And getting shot was a kindness. In the Red Room, she was made to know that there are worse things than dying. She was made to flirt with death.

It's only because of her training that Natasha can accept not having an extraction plan. There are rules here that she has to follow, rules- not orders. SHIELD’s moral code just happens to be more honorable than her last superiors'. She realizes though that Strike Team Delta having no extraction plan was SHIELD’s cute way of saying “yeah, you’re extreme and lethal and that’s what makes you expendable”. Even if she’s working for the 'good' guys, they still are wary of their top two agents which says more than enough about Clint Barton and just how skilled he is. Not that Natasha needs any further evidence.

Strike Team Delta's first official operation is in Singapore. SHIELD picked up on a secret weapons manufacturing base inside a mining factory. They've been creating and selling crystals-powered guns to underground insurgents to increase rebel power in the territory. There's immense pressure on both of them- Clint's repertoire of skills being combined with how lethal Natasha is should be enough to clear out the rebels. There is still doubt lingering and Natasha can sense it. Since she'd never officially gone through reconditioning she had to prove her ability to function like a good agent otherwise. She knows that those Level Four missions were just assessments to see where her loyalties rested- if she’d bank the moment she stepped out a of SHIELD van- if she’d prove Agent Barton wrong by defecting back to her communist superiors. More importantly, if Natasha Romanoff had it in her to be something other than a stone-faced brainwashed high-risk assassin. Fury of all was the one watching her the closest. Now it's a matter of proving how well Natasha can work with Clint alone in the field with one way in and one way out.

They fly in via Quinjet (apparently Clint is a skilled pilot) and dip into enemy territory. They go in clean. The Black Widow snags the group of scientists SHIELD put a tag on and uploads all the scientific data directly to Fury's office at HQ. Any hidden data about the weapons manufacturers, delivery routes, and the parties involved is retrieved by Natasha in an effortless flourish and installed on a flash drive. SHIELD will deploy  clean out the rest. Hawkeye takes care of the security (which are really goons for hire) long-distance. All in all, the mission goes smoother than anyone at SHIELD anticipated. But Barton and Romanoff are just that great together. They know how to move around each other; their bodies know how to interact when words aren't enough. She chalks it up to the way their relationship is, that firm trust that Clint's established with her. With him, the concept of teamwork doesn't sound all that foreign anymore.

“This mission was a smashing success. Fury is more than pleased with the results,” Phil announces that afternoon when he called them into his office for a debriefing, “Barton and Romanoff, you have proven your ability to work together in the field. You do realize that this means you’re getting sent on burlier missions. This is a grueling way of life but not something you two are unaware of since you're the best of the best. So be prepared. Your next op is in 0900 hours.”

Phil was, as Clint declared was never a good thing, always right. The assassins do get deployed wherever and whenever. Calling it an inconvenience would be an understatement. Days where they just get off missions and are sent on another the same day aren’t uncommon. But it’s SHIELD and Natasha doesn’t have anything else to do with her time so she hardly complains. She’s wired for this. Deploy, kill only if it’s a necessity, gather intel, head back to base. It’s clean, it’s quick, it’s her forte. The most important thing about these missions is the proof and fortification of trust between the two assassins. Their communication in the field is impossible to replicate. Natasha knows when she hears that arrow thud into the chest of a gunman just how far into enemy lines she is. Just like Clint knows when he hears a spine crack just how close they are to heading back to New York.

And it’s nice being able to slam your fists into people’s faces. The ops are heavy and the ache in their bones when they return to base says it all. For Clint this is the only way of life he can have. He's been hardened over and peeled apart far too many times to make the choice to do anything else. These kind of ops require a certain stoicism that cannot be taught. For Natasha, it's atonement and chance to do the good she knows she will never be on the inside. The pain in her bones is just as rewarding as the smiles she gets to share with Clint when it's just the two of them behind closed doors. It doesn’t chase away the nightmares. It doesn’t make anything okay.

But at least a difference is being made. At least here she has a chance to save lives instead of take them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a small chapter update to introduce Strike Team Delta's existence into the story. Next chapter will be much longer ~and angsty i'm so sorry but it's necessary~ and coming soon :,)


	5. Year Two Month One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Following a failed mission in Burma, Natasha makes a proposition that greatly upsets the usually stoic Clint Barton, and he in turn finally comes clean with the true reason why he doesn't like reporting to Medical.

 

 

 

Y E A R    T W O   M O N T H   O N E

 

 

“Like magic,” Clint chuckles into the air as he limps into the apartment, settling down on the couch. He and Natasha had just gotten back from an emergency recon-gone-wrong in Burma ( _I_ _t's called Myanmar, Clint._ _Same difference Natasha, New York City and The Big Apple are the same thing right?_ ) where a random group of boys in their early teens attacked them with machine guns. They weren't even a part of the mission and Clint really didn't have it in him to kill a bunch of kids so naturally he and Natasha fled as soon as they were ambushed.

They lost their target.

And Clint knows that he was stabbed, even packed some gauze on it while they were on the Quinjet (because leave it to Clint to get stabbed in a gunfight). But he knows Natasha will jump right on his case if he tells her. As if limping into his apartment wasn't already a sign of the fact that he's been hurt.

"Out of nowhere we're ambushed by a bunch of children with freaking machine guns. I ask Coulson how they got the drop on us and he tells me 'I can't answer that, Agent Barton. I guess you can say it was like magic. Magic, Natasha. Tell me what's 'magical' about kids with machine guns because I'm clueless." When Natasha makes a face, Clint relents a sigh in apology. "Actually, don't answer that, sorry."

Clint shifts to the right on the cushions, all haphazard and uncoordinated. A thick hue of dark red starts to soak right through his pale blue shirt.

"You're bleeding," Natasha's eyes are fixed on where he's been wounded.

Clint follows her eyes to the blood that's damped through his top. "Aw shucks, thought I managed to stop the bleeding. Forgot I even came out scathed." He winces, inching over to the side while he rolls his shirt up. He actually hears Natasha hiss an expletive under her breath before she hooks her coat on the door and settles down by his knees to get a better look.

"You're such a liar, Barton. Why didn't you go to medical and get this looked at?" Natasha growls, pressing two fingers against the burning flesh.

"It's a waste of time, I can do a simple epidural stitch in a jiffy. I'm not going through questioning and having to sit there and be stitched up while the doctor reads out my dazzling medical record. My first aid kit is just as efficient. If you would be so kind," Clint's grin finds its way through a grimace of pain.

Natasha tries not to roll her eyes into the back of her her skull and stands up. She heads into the bathroom (that actually smells like cherry blossoms and she's not sure how she's just now noticing this) and- like the spy she is, gives it a quick sweep to compartmentalize in her memories. Not that she hasn't seen Clint's bathroom before. She just likes to remind herself of things that are palpable- like the way Clint arranges his toiletries (Toothbrush A, Toothbrush B- backup toothbrush, Toothbrush C, and Colgate Toothpaste) and the fact that he puts his tissue rolls on the wrong side but they both do because they're southpaws, and the fact that his hamper is actually never full because he's always at HQ or overseas. Natasha gets a good look at herself in the mirror, pays close attention to the wear of Strike Team Delta in the circles under her eyes. Her hair is the longest it's been in years and she can see that her naturally unruly curls are threatening to return.

And to think that the last time she was in another man's bathroom she was preparing to hollow out his jugular with her knife. Now it's to stitch up the idiot who refuses to get any help whatsoever. She can't even be mad at that idiot because she knows deep down she's the same way. And speaking of that said idiot, Natasha reaches up to the to top of the bathroom cabinet to grab the worn metal box with the words _F i r s t  A i d_   carved into the rusty surface.

When she comes out of the bathroom, Clint gives her a "did you get lost in there?" eyebrow raise and she just shakes her head, settling back down on the ground to get to work.

"I can do this on my own, Tash," Clint insists, watching his partner unclasp the box and setting the contents needed on the glass table.

"You are _not_ going to stitch yourself. I've seen how sloppy you are when you're in a rush to get it over with. You're an archer, you'd think you'd know have more patience when it comes to taking care of yourself. Now just sit back, I've done this far too many times."

The only sign of shock at her sudden pushiness is Clint's arched eyebrow. But he does comply because it's truly not worth fighting with her over this. She rolls his shirt up by a few more inches and peels the bled-through gauze off of his stomach. With light fingers, she dabs peroxide across the wound. It's actually a lot less messier than it could be given the circumstances. Natasha guesses he's most likely started bleeding again when they ventured up the stairs to his floor.

"Dammit, Nat, that actually burns," Clint mumbles through clenched teeth.

"Yeah well if you actually stocked anything other than rubbing alcohol in your apartment then you'd have a nice distraction. For now you'll have to take it like a man." Natasha teases him with a smile.

While she's preparing the area for suturing, her wandering eyes appreciate the body she's working with. She recognizes the fading scars and bullet wounds falling in line with hardened flesh that's been groomed by years of acrobatics training and archery. He's done more than enough to maintain and keep up his form. She's had her fair share of workout sessions with him but it's always nice to appreciate up close how his build boasts the results of his hard work. His body is, needless to say, very pleasing to the eye. She smirks to herself before she gives her thoughts away and reaches for more peroxide.

"Thankfully it's shallow like the last one I stitched," she presses the cotton against him, dabbing away the last bits of old and new blood. "How'd you even manage to get stabbed?"

"I'm sure I got grazed by a knife. I'll live." Clint responds tersely.

"Luckily," Natasha mumbles.

"You getting sentimental on me, Romanoff?"

"If I was, I'd force you to go to Medical to make sure you weren't stabbed with a dirty blade. I hope you got your tetanus shots," Natasha smiles again while she picks up the forceps to hold the needle in her left hand. Her fingers brush across his lower abdomen to steady him because he's started jittering and probably hasn't noticed. "Deep breath" she reminds him. And then with trained hands she threads the prolene right through his puckered flesh. Clint does the exact opposite of course. He sucks in a sharp breath, shutting his eyes.

"Are my fingers too cold?" Natasha pauses, concern growing beneath the green in her eyes. He's done this the last time she stitched him closed. He had held his breath the entire time like he was about to dive underwater. If she thought less of him, she'd accuse him of being a wuss but the thing is, he's not tensed up like he's in pain. He looks like he's trying to get out of his own skin.

"No, keep going, Tasha," Clint shakes his head as if he's reading her thoughts. He swallows and relaxes his muscles. She finishes her stitching work in silence and packs some fresh gauze over it for precautionary measures. Her patchwork is neat and clean and thorough- much like everything else she does.

"Thanks," Clint rasps and Natasha rolls his shirt back down, giving him another small smile and stands up, "Let me clean that up-" he starts but Natasha shoots him a warning eyebrow raise. Clint surrenders a laugh and stays put. Be it far from him to stop the assassin if she wants to help. Seeing Natasha moving around his apartment like it's her own makes some part of him swell (with what, happiness? Gratitude? Admiration?). She throws away the snipped bits of prolene, used gauze, and bloodied cotton balls before snapping the First Aid kit shut.

"Do you have any food in this place?" Natasha pats her stomach on her way out of the bathroom, "I'm starving."

"I was thinking we could order some pizza actually. We literally just got back from Burma-"

"-Myanmar-"

"-Whatever, and my fridge isn't appropriately stocked. I mean, there's a pack of soda and some salad and milk in there. Also I have some pasta in the cabinets. And I don't know about you but my body is too tired to stand around waiting for water to boil. And if my body is too tired then so is yours."

"We're wired differently, Barton. I did ballet. I know how to push my body."

"And I was in the circus and I know how to strain my body even when it's crying for everything to stop. Now, take a break, you've done enough for me. I'll call Giorgio's and see what their special is today."

"It's meatball and parmesan," Natasha calls out. It isn't the first time Clint has ordered from Giorgio's. They almost never deliver on time and Clint always gives them Mr. Nabiha's address instead of his own. Even if they do take an hour to deliver, the flavor is somehow worth the wait. Living in Volgograd, she ate mostly fish and porridge and soup so coming to America, she'd taken those practices with her. She made an effort to retrain her palate and enjoy 'American' cuisine (which really means various combinations of meals stolen from other cultures and traditions). She memorized Giorgio's entire menu in case she wanted to treat herself to some out of town pizza when she was alone in her apartment. But Natasha is honest with herself, she almost never eats half of the things Barton has her eating when she's staying at her place.

Clint orders a large sausage pizza- both his and Natasha's favorite kind, six garlic knots, a small order of ziti for Natasha to take home, and some zeppoles for "desert".

Forty-five minutes later, Mr. Nabiha knocks on Clint's door with the food delivery. Clint tips his landlord twenty bucks (SHEILD's paycheck is a real handsome one) and two slices of pizza for his daughter.

Their bodies drained and aching since their failed op, the two assassins spend their time lazing on Clint's sofa stuffing their faces with warm oily pizza. Porky the Pig is this afternoon's special. Natasha hasn't given any indication that she was opposed to putting on Looney Tunes when Clint had suggested it. She looks a little more relaxed than the last few times they've watched it. But it still doesn't mean she's 100 percent comfortable. Clint knows there's something wrong there, knows it has a lot to do with the Red Room and the pieces of her that have been taken and never returned. But she hasn't complained yet so he doesn't change it. They eat in pleasant silence and let the cartoons take over until there's no more pizza left and two full tummies.

"I should have brought beer to digest this with," Natasha mumbles, taking Clint's plates and putting them in the sink (so yeah maybe she's grown very domestic here but Clint just has that effect on her and it's not like he'll stab her while her back is turned) "Or do you not drink beer either?"

"It's not that I don't drink anything, Natasha, I'm just not the hugest fan. I drink on rare and special occasions, like at weddings and shit."

"And when's the last time you've been to a wedding?" Natasha runs her hands under the faucet.

"Last year? I'm not big on weddings. A lot of agents think I'm more or less of an asshole."

"And why's what?"

"Eh," Clint shrugs as she comes back into the living room area, "I have a lot of secrets that I don't tell. I guess because no one knows much about me I come off as a cavalier agent. People get a lot of preconceived notions about me. Also I'm pretty sure my resting face deters them from talking to me during lunch break. I've been at SHIELD for years and I still don't give anything away to anyone. Even today a couple of agents were griping at me about you know, us." A sheepish look passes over his eyes, "Because apparently you and I are having sex and I'm not being nice by neglecting to share the details. No one wants to ask you because they're afraid of you, which they should be. And somehow people believe we're screwing because I'm the only person you've been seen with in the hallways. I sometimes forget that there are guys at SHIELD who actually sit around in groups and talk about who they're getting off with." Clint folds his arms behind his head, looking to Natasha.

"Are you bothered by the idea that people think we're sleeping together?" the Russian asks. The question has been sitting on her tongue for a while now. They've both known of the rumors for months.

"No," Clint shakes his head. Natasha is a very beautiful woman, of course he's noticed. To the naked eye, she's every man's dream- pouty lips, heavy lidded-eyes, a rare shade of red hair, curves in all the right places, she's a masterpiece fit into a 5 foot 3 inch body. She is incandescence, she is magma, she is a perfection that exists only for herself. She's crafted herself into infallibility and knows her powers over anything that has blood flowing through its veins. And Clint isn't exactly impervious to her. He's aware of how his body heats up when she lowers her eyelashes, how the silky husk in her voice tickles the strings on his heart, how her presence is just enough to fill every inch of space around him. Natasha is an addictive kind of chaos- sustenance and power and bullets and knives, like the way it felt when he used a trapeze for the the first time. She's _magnificent_ , and it's everything that she does that makes her that way.

But Clint isn't the sort of man to salivate over her breasts or thighs or lips in his spare time. He respects her too much, values her trust in him too much. He thinks of that as some form of betrayal to Natasha, to know she's been subjected to all forms of sexual abuse and then turn around and imagine what it's like to have her to him self? She doesn't need that, doesn't need any of it. What she needs is a good solid constant in her life- someone she can trust and rely on. What she needs a friend. And Clint is more than glad to be the one she chose to let in.

"Am I supposed to be bothered?"

"No- most men would... I'm just not used to-" Natasha pulls her knees up to her chest, which Clint has learned is a warning sign for 'i've said too much'. "We've known each other for a considerable amount of time and you've never said or done anything to indicate that you see me in that way, or want me in that way."

"Well I'm not the hugest fan of taking advantage of women, Natasha."

"I'm sure that more than once you've wondered what it's like to sleep with me, Barton," the redhead lowers her voice, allows some of the Black Widow to mix in like honey. "You're only a _man_."

"That's almost insulting, Natasha," Clint is put-off by what she just implied, "I don't just... _gosh_ when's the last time you saw me bring a girl home? I don't leer over women like a savage beast. Sex isn't...sex is a different thing for me. I can't just go and screw the nearest woman because she's an easy resort. I'm not that kind of man, I can't think like that. I just don't. And no, I'm not gay. Let me honest, I love women and I love sex. But those things aren't a priority for me."

"It was just a thought, Clint. I mean, if you've ever wanted to, you could. You can think of it as a repayment you for everything you've done," Natasha tries to smooth the situation over. She has been trying to figure out the most suitable way to return the favors he has done for her. For trusting her, sticking with her, and introducing what real friendship and partnership means into her life. He has mentioned twice now that he loves sex and Natasha can tell that Clint hasn't actually had sex in a long, long time. Since neither never approached the subject, she figures she'll put it on the table and make it clear that the option stands. "My skill set does include various experiences in the art of seduction and pleasure." It doesn't occur to her that she couldn't have said anything more wrong than what she just did.

"So you want me to treat you like a sex object?" Clint leans forward, looking at Natasha with sheer disbelief in his eyes.

Natasha's eyebrows crease as if he's asked her an impossible question.

"Do you want me to treat you like they treated you in the Red Room? Do you really think of me that way? You think I'd just take your body just because? Oh, so just you know how to make a man come just by blinking means I should sit here and have you go down on me? You know how close that borders on rape, Natasha? Is that what you think of me?"

Natasha bites her bottom lip, eyes downcast. "Of course not." His words are like small daggers. Here she is offering to suit his needs and he's furious with her. Natasha has never had a man refuse her advances- not that she was making any in particular, but Clint's reaction throws her off nonetheless. Men have died trying to obtain any part of her. And yet Clint wants nothing from her.

"What do you want me to say? That I find you attractive? Is that what you want to hear? Yes, I do. Of course I think you're beautiful. Of course I find you attractive. Any human with eyesight can see that. But that doesn't mean I sit here when you're gone and fantasize about ways I could use you for my own sexual gratification."

"I wasn't-"

"That's exactly where you were headed, Natasha. I couldn't even begin to explain to you what that line of thinking does to me," Clint buries his face in his hands. The words are just jammed in his throat, unsure of how to come up. - _T_ _ell her the truth_. _Tell her why you haven't touched her anymore than needed. Tell her why you're so grandly fucked up_. _God knows you owe that to her at least instead of having her sit here thinking you want nothing to do with her_.- Clint groans something into his palms as the muscles in his arms tighten up like he's about to turn into stone.

Natasha also finds herself battling her mind for putting him in this situation. The regret eats at her- _How foolish can you be?_ Granted, it's been two years and she hasn't seen Clint with a girlfriend and the only indication that he's had a love life is in the handful of exes he has at SHIELD (and by handful, she means four women)  that he purposefully avoids. She knows of Agent Morse only because that one time Clint mentioned her and what she's seen on SHIELD's database. They've yet to even meet since Morse works at the Triskelion in Washington while she and Clint stay at HQ in New York.

Clint is never keen on discussing his exes just like Natasha is never keen on discussing Alexei, whose existence is yet to be proven authentic or fabricated. It's painful to him just like it is to her. She's never even considered these things until now. She realizes that she's hurt his feelings, which is such an odd and foreign thought to have- hurting Clint's feelings. He's so stoic and compact and as casual and friendly as he can be; he's like a book bound in chains. He won't open up to no one. Much less than she does. And he's been such a cornerstone since she was brought into SHIELD and so willing to hear stories she swears to never tell another soul. You almost forget that he can be hurt.

"Clint..." Natasha thinks to reach out to touch the archer but she keeps her hands at her sides. He doesn't look up. "Clinton." Her accent almost slips out when she uses his full name to get his attention. "Say something. I didn't mean to upset you."

Clint's pupils are blown wide when he meets her eyes. He takes a deep breath, catching his nerves. He's always in control of himself and knows that deep down inside he has his father's temper. He doesn't want to say or do anything that could jeopardize their friendship. _Get a hold of yourself, Barton._ He inhales until he's able to lull his pulse down to its normal rate.

"I'm not angry at you, Natasha," Clint grounds two fingers into his forehead, "I have issues. With sex, I mean. And anything non-consensual."

 _It wouldn't be non-consensual_ , Natasha's head screams. But she lets him continue. She's always been less talkative of the two.

"It's only enjoyable when I know I can trust myself and be intimate with a woman in all ways instead of one. The last woman I loved, or thought I loved, or didn't love enough...she took a lot of things with her when she'd left. And I didn't fight for her. I never fought for her. I was just waiting for things to be over. I've spent my entire life waiting for things to be over. You know what that's like. You know all too well what that's like."

Clint shakes his head, looking down at his hands and clenching his fists, "It's not even just sex, it's intimacy. I have a habit of giving myself to people I think I can trust only for them to look inside, see how ruined and messed up I am on the inside, and then they leave. That's been the pattern my whole life even since I was a child. And because I am the way I am, the way I've always been, I've had things happen to me, Tasha. Bad things."

"What things?" Natasha prompts even though she thinks she knows the answer- should have recognized all the signs in him that she'd seen in herself already. How frightening it is to have a mirror sitting right across from you. She swallows a wad of emotions down her throat. "You can tell me, Clint. Just like I've told you before."

"Wanna know why I try to evade Medical?" Clint breaks eye contact, looking down at his worn hands, "I don't like hospitals because good things have never come out of them. I remember that every time I had gone to the hospital I left worse off than before. My father was an abusive piece of shit with arms so big he'd pummel my brother and I until our bones broke. You know one time he threw me in the dumpster in the middle of winter and I was so fucking scared that I didn't climb back out. Caught an ear infection and everything. I was a sickly child, went to the hospital several times. And not a single doctor ever looked at the bruises on my body and thought- 'gee this kid is getting his ass kicked left and right'. The general consensus is that hospitals are supposed to help people. But you know, small town like Waverly where everyone knows everyone, things often get buried in the wind. The incidents were ignored, overlooked, and dismissed as "aggressive childs' play between my brother and I. So I got sent home and my Pop continued to toss us around like ragdolls on every surface in that place. My mother couldn't do anything about it. Or didn't. It's hard to tell the difference between perception and truth anymore."

Natasha draws in tighter on herself, goosebumps rising on her skin in brisk waves. Clint's so vulnerable now, sitting next to her and telling her things about the broken parts of his life that she had no idea of. His vulnerability evokes feelings of distress in her.

"And then one day I was rushed to the hospital because my drunken father took Mama for a ride and ended up veering into a pole. Both died on collision. The truck wasn't even recognizable- got sent right to the junkyard to be crushed. I thought it was finally over, I thought my brother and I finally had a chance, you know? But the Barton family had no next of kin. Kind of a tradition for us to disperse and become anonymous tumbleweeds. Instead, CPS came in and put my brother and I in foster care. And that's...that's when I learned that there are other, worse kinds of cruel people in this world."

Clint starts to shake. He actually starts _shaking_ and it shouldn't bother Natasha but it does. Her eyes burn just as her heart clamps down on itself. Her fingers twitch like she should touch him, give him some form of life or comfort the way he has done to her. But he doesn't seem to want to be touched right now so she wills herself to sit still. It's not hard. She sits like she (thinks) she was made to do during her ballet sessions, legs crisscrossed and hands folded in her lap.

He finally tells her the truth- about what happened in the orphanages. He tells her about being separated from his brother in their living arrangements, about lying in an itchy hard bed at night in a room with forty other boys aged nine to eleven. He tells her about the warden with the wire-rimmed glasses and kind smile who'd kept an eye out on him. The one who'd spent months winning Clint's trust. The one had allowed him to have snacks after lights-out, who took him to the toy store to pick out some comics every few weeks, who used to let him drink chocolate milk on Thursdays. Clint hadn't even told Barney about the warden because he was scared that Barney would be upset at him for making friends with strangers. The warden had made him feel so special and important for once in his miniscule life. Until one late winter night after lights off the warden took him into his private office. And then proceeded to destroy whatever form of innocence a ten-year-old Clinton Francis Barton had left. The one who told Clint not to tell anyone what happened because no one would ever adopt a filthy child.

He tells her about having to be taken to the hospital again. And how he was medically examined against his will, how he was glued together with trepidation while having foreign hands touching him. Once the doctors had concluded their investigation, that said warden was arrested, and Clint and Barney had been taken into government custody until they could find a family stable enough to take in the Barton boys.

It hadn't been long before CPS had placed them in a foster home with the Larkensons who lived not far from Waverly. And some job the investigators had done, placing Clint and Barney in a 'family friendly' home. After two zero-incident months of staying there, Clint's own foster mom had come up into his room one night while he was deep in sleep. He'd woken up when she sat down on his bed and she had pressed her finger to her lips to shush him while she reached for his covers. Had Barney not been in the room with him, had Barney not jumped up that night and howled at Mrs. Larkenson to get out of their room, Clint knows exactly what would have occurred. And the older Barton, just fourteen and-a-half and Clint then-eleven turning twelve, had made the decision to escape- not just from the Larkensons- from everything. From their own lives, their own hells that they'd been made to squander in. In more ways than one, Clint knows that joining that circus had saved his life. Just like going to that hospital had ended it before.

He stops speaking after that. He shuts his eyes and wills himself not to break down into pieces he's spent decades building back together.

Pain is relative. This is something Natasha has known for as long as she can remember. Disassociation can make anything painless. For instance, if you find a small box inside your subconscious that you can hide inside, the ability to hurt becomes nonexistent. Clint didn't have that understanding as a child. And Natasha finds herself _hurting_ for him. It's a kind of hurt that's unanticipated. It knocks her hard off of her axis. She wants to grind it into the ground with the heel of her foot and never look back. Is this how Clint felt when she told him about what they had done to her? Did his own heart stop beating and climb up his throat?

"Coulson knows," Clint rouses the will to speak after the deafening silence, "Not in detail. Small things, yes. But not everything." There was more to Coulson putting them together than they both realized. He must have gotten the idea that Strike Team Delta was more beneficial for them than the whole of SHIELD. And knowing Phil...

Clint's ex-wife has some understanding that he'd gone through traumatic things as a child. Bobbi knows about his father, but he never quite got around to telling her the full story. In those two years of marriage, Clint had worked through most of his discomforts with sex through her. It wasn't the wisest way to work himself through the motions but throughout his entire life he's internalized everything to the point where it can do nothing but eat holes through his heart. This is also why Natasha is so central in his life now. Rebuilding his self, facing his self, using words to convey as opposed to arrows- he can only do this with Natasha. She doesn't even realize it. She's his cornerstone too.

Natasha shakes her head slowly, forcing the disturbing images of a tiny defenseless Clint out of her mind. It makes sense now, why he gets so uptight when she badgers him about going to Medical. _I should have known._ She winces like a sharp pain has shot through her. "I'm...sorry, Clint. I'm sorry-"

Clint picks absently at the dried blood on his shirt, contemplating why he hadn't bothered to change into a different one. "Look," he clasps his hands together, eyes rising to meet Natasha's, "This isn't something to fret over. It's nothing in comparison to what happened to you."

"No, Clint. Don't say that," Natasha snaps, shaking her head in firm disagreement, "My past and whatever burden I carry with it does _not_ invalidate yours. Especially when you've been harmed by people who are supposed to love and take care of you. Your pain is intimate. My pain is phantom. There is a difference. Don't say stupid things like 'it doesn't matter.' If it's a part of you then it does matter. And I...couldn't imagine if you were to betray me or hurt me in such a way."

"Tash, you know I'd _never_ -"

"I know, I know. I just didn't know you had gone through that. The beatings, I figured since you referenced them often. But...not the rapes. And the hospital visits. Your own father forced you into the trash- I- I didn't...Clint you were so _young_."

"As were you, Natasha," Clint answers sternly, "Doesn't change anything. Like you said before, no pitying right? I'm not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for me. Just like I didn't befriend you because I want to get inside your pants. Point is, I don't want you offering up your body. Especially not to me. I don't want you to owe me anything. After all that you've done- everything you've done, you owe it to yourself. It's your own will to change that pulled you out of Prague, just like it's your own will now to be a part of SHIELD. I guess I'm just, opening up to you, waiting to see if you'll see the ugly and run away too."

"Well," Natasha's voice lowers again, her smile as soft as ever. "I don't know if you've realized it yet, but...I'm kind of stuck with you."

"Yeah well perhaps I'm a paranoid freak always waiting for the knife to drop." He hates sounding like this, like a scared little puppy in a dark alley.

"Justifiably paranoid. But you're not a freak," Natasha's smile spreads to her eyes, "You're a _Hawk_. Big and strong."

All the lines of tension and worry fall away from Clint's face when he laughs hard enough to tear his stitches.

Natasha's eyes lighten up, following the way Clint clutches his abdomen. The childish laugh that he has is so opposite his hardened face. It's such a sweet soothing sound, if Natasha has ever come to know such a thing. And such a presence. He's a stolen child cloaked in metal chains forced to become a hard man. Much like herself. And still, he's so soft in nature, has something so filling about him, brings such a relief to her life. She feels the need to protect him from his demons whether it's in her place or not.

"I mean it, Clint," Natasha reaffirms, "You and me. Okay?"

"Okay." Clint's fingers bunch together like he wants to hold something while he smiles back lightly. "Yes."

Natasha sighs in confidence and sits back. Her green eyes are still on him. She's known for a while.

She wants him, maybe wants him enough to tell him. But now she can't.

And she doesn't even know why.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> even two master assassins can't run from the truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to thank the impeccable shadesfalcon for being the absolute hero that she is and beta-ing this for me. If not for her enthusiasm I'd have had a meltdown about this chapter. :,)

    

 

 

 

Y E A R   T W O   M O N T H   F I V E

 

 

Natasha is hopelessly and utterly screwed. 

Because of a certain archer named Clinton Francis Barton.

Because she finds herself at a stalemate that she couldn't have anticipated if it were graffiti'd across the SHIELD hallways in bold red letters. Because Clint is everywhere in her thoughts, surfacing in the mist of her dreams and when she's showering at five in the morning and when she's being debriefed by Coulson. She's been fighting herself, unwillingly willing herself to put him out of her mind and focus solely on whatever package her handler dumps on her desks. Focus is her forte.

Focus is arch in her feet when she rises in releve and the dilation of her pupils when she sends bullets through the bulls-eye during practice. Focus is _not_ the familiar rasp in Clint's voice when he speaks to her or the gentle and trained way his eyes stay on her when she's talking to him- as if she has his undivided attention and he couldn't look away if someone wrenched his neck to the side. That is distraction and she can't afford to be distracted.

The last few months have been nothing short of successful missions courtesy of Strike Team Delta. "No extraction plan" be damned, the Black Widow and Hawkeye pull through every time (bullet wounds and all). Natasha considers herself to be unflappable- mostly collected given the things she's endured over her course of life- so why should she be at battle with herself regarding her...feelings for Agent Barton?

_-Because you're compromised. And compromised means vulnerable. Vulnerable means weak._

Coulson's even noticed that something is off when Natasha runs the paperwork by his office.

"I'm under the impression that you're bothered," her handler says, face warm but his tone serious. "Did Barton do something?"

"No," Natasha shakes her head, voice plain and neutral, "Why, did he say anything?"

"Well Barton's been a little off lately. Seems like you two are going through some kind of rough patch. He didn't go and confess his undying love for you or anything like that, did he?" Even if his face is serious, there's a smile in Coulson's voice that lets Natasha know he's just pulling her leg.

"Of course not," she replies. "Unless you know something I don't, Barton's not like that. I'm on my way to talk to him now," she lies.

Coulson lets her continue her commute with a dismissive nod, noting that the way to Agent Barton's quarters is in the opposite direction that she's heading. But if the Black Widow decides to lie to him, it's her prerogative.

Natasha is fully aware that Phil knows she's lying, but he isn't going to press it, and for that she's grateful. She's been doing more than her usual lying- to herself and especially to Clint. Over the past couple of months she's spaced out the time they spend together. Instead of rendezvousing at Barton's studio apartment like they've always done after work (if you can call what they do "work") Natasha takes to sleeping overnight in her quarters at SHIELD or stays at her apartment without sending so much as a text. Clint had asked her earlier to come eat with him like they've done routinely for as long as she's been in America and Natasha had wordlessly declined, ignoring the confusion and faint injured look on his face.

She wants to make herself believe that this is for her own good because she doesn't do whatever it is that she's thinking of doing and she can't give Clint the companionship she knows he would expect of her because she doesn't know how. And she regards Barton's feelings- knows there's an underlying habit of self-deprecation beneath all that endurance and gentleness. His words "maybe I'm just a paranoid freak always waiting for the knife to drop" sit like rocks in her stomach. She doesn't want him to believe she's disinterested in him. Their friendship is something she values greatly- like the snug weight of her glocks in her fists and if she's wanting more than he's willing to give and vice versa, then she'd prefer not to run the risk of maiming this invaluable bond that they have. If that means putting a barrier between them until she works things out with herself then so be it. So she takes the path to the gym to clear her mind and do what she does best- hit stuff.

Natasha takes a quick stop to the locker room and swipes her identification card over the scanner before her locker hisses and opens. She slips into the standard SHIELD gym wear- a fitted navy blue short-sleeved shirt with the eagle emblem on the sides with matching sweatpants and sneakers. Slipping her black gym bag over her shoulder, Natasha swallows down a second wave of guilt when she remembers that it was Clint who'd thrown her the bag two years ago. He'd said it was his own bag he'd used when he first came to SHIELD (there's a small hole in the right corner that was torn through by a stray arrowhead just for Barton authenticity) and felt like passing it down since Natasha didn't own one at the time. She never saw any reason to stop using it, even now.

The gymnasium is particularly vacant today. A few six or seven Level Five agents are spread out in the expanse of the gym but most of the agents on this shift are relaxing in the break room to watch some obscure pulp film. Not that Natasha was invited because she doesn't wait for invitations. She just knows these things, where the agents like to hang out at when they're supposed to be working, or the blind spots where agents can freely fraternize, and the time windows where one can sneak off their shift and grab some grub outside of SHIELD HQ. It's her job to know these things. The lingering agents, all female, stop whatever it is that they're doing when she walks into the gymnasium but she pays them no mind. They regard her with alert stares, giving a curt nod as she strolls past them.

The best thing about the gymnasium in SHIELD is the versatility of it. SHIELD anticipates diversity in their agents and the training courses in the gym make that very evident. There's two floors in the gym- one for breaking in Level One agents, sparring, and general exercising. The second level is much more of an obstacle course and Natasha likes to go there (although not recently) to watch Clint flip around and do other acrobatic extremes. The dark linoleum and grey brick walls aren't too different form the way the rest of HQ looks. Long lights hover over every exercise equipment known to man, casting a sufficient enough glow. Natasha takes a generous swig of lukewarm water before heading over to the area where some fresh punching bags await her.

Coulson had said she seemed _bothered_? Damn that he's noticed, damn that Clint is affected enough by her absence to make Coulson notice... He couldn't have said anything because he doesn't strike her as the type to talk about their relationship to other people. Yes, Clint's well-guarded but Natasha doesn't know him the way Coulson knows him. He's been around Phil longer, and Phil would know more of his tells than she would.

Natasha tosses a few warm up hits before she slams her fist hard into the navy blue punching bag that she's chosen as her victim. She desperately needs to clear the fog in her mind.

But she can't.

Because now that she thinks about it, Clint probably doesn't even want to face her at this point, probably thinks that what he told her makes her appear unwanted to him. Which is so far from the truth. What _is_ the truth? The truth is that after that botched assignment in Myanmar, after she offered to have sex with him and he'd opened up to her, he'd left a gaping hole inside of her. And once Natasha had gone home that night and was left to contemplate why she'd suddenly felt so open, she finally realized what it was.

The punching bag makes a loud thwacking noise when she delivers two reverse kicks, shifting her weight to her supporting leg.

She's become too familiar with his presence. They've always been very familiar with each other, conscious of the tentative waters of their relationship. Even when he'd said his first words to her, it seemed like the sentences grappled into her heart and hooked her onto him. Natasha allowed herself to accept permanence into her life. Clint Barton _is_ her permanence. She knows the smile that spreads across her lips when she's sitting on his couch and the raise in her heartbeat when he touches her skin. And though they've never hugged, when he's close enough to her, she always breathes in his rough scent of the woods with faint swivels of cherry blossoms. There have been instances of simple silence and complacency between them where she studies his features with careful eyes, not quite caring if he notices or not. Still after all this time, he fascinates her with the remarkableness of the man that he is.

She stabilizes the punching bag before delivering hard consecutive kicks with both legs. She should have done some warm up stretches but she's feeling somewhat reckless so if she pulls a muscle, it's solely her doing.

Suddenly she's eighteen again and a morbid energy overtakes the room despite her surroundings. A cluster of voices hiss their disappointment in her. She has betrayed their cause and sided with the Americans and now they're going to make sure she feels every fiber of their disappointment prickling under her skin... _Don't be careless with your body, Natalia._

**_No_.**

Because she is no longer Natalia, she is Natasha. And she does not thrive in bleach-smelling corridors anymore, she is an agent of SHIELD with a ledger she aims to clear day by day. She can be careless if she desires to. She's earned it.

The barriers that the Red Room had constructed around her won't stop crumbling down and the farther away she is from that mindset, the more eye-opening everything becomes. The concept of intimacy and attachment had been dangerously warped into something harsh and evil. Since the age of seven, the only relationships she was allowed to conduct was between the bullets she fired and the person meeting the point of her blade. It's what removed all difficulties of killing for her. It's what drove her into deeper devotion to her superiors when they'd forced her to marry a man only to have him killed after she'd come to love him. And then they told her he never existed. She was left to decide what was true and untrue.

Thinking of Alexei sends surges of rage up her bones. She rams her fists hard into the punching bag. That's the thing- they loved doing it to her over and over again, making her believe that she had some semblance of ownership. And they praised her progress because she was the perfect killing machine with just enough tenacity to be broken to the core. Her body and her mind was _never_ (punch) her (kick) own (grunt). Especially the most intimate parts of her- something that she should have been allowed to keep for herself. If she had any anger for what was done to her, she was forced to direct it anywhere but the outside.

The chain links holding the punching bag give a few warning squeaks when she delivers a whirlwind of blows.

She was never permitted to desire or necessitate. And now she finds herself a ways away from Russia with newfound "freedom" at SHIELD where she can dictate who and what she wants. And who else but the archer could she possibly be interested in?

When she had offered herself to Clint, it wasn't just so that he could receive pleasure. It was also because she wanted to be with him. Sex is a matter of ambiguity to Natasha. It's never been anything but two things- exploitative abuse and a weapon used to extract information. Whenever necessary, she had spread her legs to get the job done- no matter how repulsive and sordid the target actually was. Who was she to question whether she wanted it or not? Natasha can say that she's actually fucked to survive- to cling to her life because she had to get the job done whether she liked it or not. But for the first time in years, she's desiring to be with someone.

 _You're irreversibly attracted to Clinton Francis Barton_ , she muses for a moment while catching her breath, _and the veins that trail down his forearms and the intriguing width of his fingers_ _and the proud body of a hard-working diligent man..._ Natasha elbows the punching bag more out of frustration than concentration. _Snap out of it, Romanoff._

Knowing just how much she wants him actually consumes her. When is the last time she wanted someone to touch her? When is the last time Natasha felt even remotely sexual enough to want to indulge the act? She's never went to bed with someone for pleasure- not since Alexei's death. If she tried to seduce Clint that would only anger him and drive a wider wedge between them. She saw how far offering to please him had gotten her. He had said he was attracted to her and admitted to thinking she was beautiful. But that's as far as it went because he wasn't too keen on sex. And knowing the precariousness of Clint's childhood makes things that much more complicated. If she had been the sole one exposed to childhood abuse then perhaps they might have stood a chance. But it's two people in a wreckage trying to find land with no map or compass. In the end, they're probably both too screwed up to do it the right way. So she makes the challenging decision to put some distance between her and Clint. She would rather continue to be his best friend than ruin the only good thing she has left.

Out the corner of Natasha's eye she spies that the few agents have stayed behind to watch her. Smirking to herself, she moves back a few feet, takes a deep breath, and delivers a wild somersault kick that finally knocks the blue bag right off the chain links. One of the agents gasps loudly. Natasha's ponytail whips around when she looks their way. She shakes her head while the agents disperse through the exit. Typical. They can stand around and watch her when she's in a trance but the moment their presence is acknowledged, they become fearful.

When the gym finally clears out, Natasha's nerves have somewhat settled. She figures she still has time for a fifteen minute jog through Central Park if she wants to burn the rest of her adrenaline off and get rid of her lascivious thoughts surrounding her partner. Turning her back to the entrance doors, she chugs down the rest of her water before toweling her sweaty forehead. She makes a mental note as she slings her bag over her shoulder that she needs to get back to base in enough time for a shower. For now, that's enough punching for today.

"Did you kick someone's ass today?" a rough and familiar voice fills the open space in the gym, causing Natasha's spine to stiffen.

It's Clint. He must have walked in while her back was turned to the door. Her first thought is that Phil must've ratted her out and she damns him for the second time today. Her second thought is the realization that he couldn't have because unless he has her on surveillance there's no way he'd know she'd be here. Her third is that Clint expected to find her here because he knows her well enough to work out where she'd be hiding.

"What?" after taking a breath, Natasha turns around slowly to meet the archer who took her by surprise.

"Did you kick someone's ass today?" Clint inquires again, nodding at the discoloration and bruises on her knuckles.

He's in his SHIELD gym wear, admirably-built arms exposed in a shirtless top and sweatpants fitting him snugly. He's standing there with a certain disquiet to his presence. His body looks good but his face tells a different story. The wear sitting in his eyes make the same guilt she felt earlier gnaw away her insides. She's never seen him look _this_ tired. She would have noticed earlier when he'd asked her eat with him in the mess hall but she'd been avoiding his eyes for a reason. She could just turn away, give him the cold shoulder like she'd done all this time.

_But you miss him. And from the looks of it, he misses you too.  
_

"Oh, no," Natasha shakes her head, her lips quirking as a small smile tries to fight it's way through her straight face, "I didn't bother wrapping my hands before I went and destroyed a punching bag," she points to the abused punching bag that's laying on the ground. It's too heavy for her to pick up. Maintenance can take care of that later. "I was just on my way out, Agent Barton."

"Oh?" Clint rubs a bandaged hand through the tufts of his hair. It doesn't go unnoticed that she referred to him as Agent Barton, insinuating the distance she's put between them. Clint's already taken it upon himself to accept the blame for whatever she's doing. After all, he gave her the space that she wordlessly asked for but never quite went after her either. She's been pulling away but he hasn't pulled her back either. Then again, why should he? She doesn't belong to him, they're not together, and Natasha is her own woman, even if she doesn't quite always know what she wants. Given the life she's led, her freedom is more than well-deserved.

"When did you injure yourself?" Natasha tilts her head at his hand.

"Some asshole junior agents were sexually harassing a new girl and she was too scared to break protocol and defend herself," Clint answers, voice less animated than Natasha remembers, "So I did her a favor and knocked a few dozen teeth out. Cut my knuckles open." he runs a finger across the area where he was bleeding earlier. He wrapped the bandage his self.

Natasha doesn't say anything in return.

It's unsurprising that Clint would go that far to protect the sanctity of a new agent. Hadn't he done that for her? And now both their hands are illustrated with purple and red furious markings, echoing their mold of character. Because that's exactly what they are; bruised by a strenuous lifestyle and made over into something persevering and remarkable. It's symbiotic and intimate all in one. She almost smiles ruefully.

"Are you still gonna head out? Or are you ready to talk about why you've been avoiding me like the plague?" Clint steps forward, reaching out to take Natasha's bag for her. He's not going to dance around the elephant in the room. He doesn't like bullshitting and only resorts to it when necessary. "I distinctly remember you saying that you're stuck with me...does that include never speaking to me again?"

Natasha looks towards the ground. _I'm not running from you, that is as much as I can promise._

"Okay...well if you're not going to talk to me, at least stretch with me." Clint suggests, "If it's not too much to ask."

"I...just had a workout. I'm still sweating, Barton," Natasha tries to wriggle her way out of this. Stretching with him probably isn't the best idea right now, not that it’s not tempting. Technically she's supposed to stretch her muscles post-workout.

"You know, Natasha I gave you months," Clint sighs, shoulders squared, hands on his hips, "At least give me thirty minutes. You and I both know Strike Team Delta has no plans for field work for the rest of the day. I didn’t plan on running into you here. In fact, I was coming here to concentrate on anything other than the fact that my best friend is hiding something from me. But since you’re here now, I figure, why not kill two birds with one stone? I already know you like punching your demons into oblivion. You ever tried _relaxing_ them for a change?"

"Who says I'm fighting my demons?" Natasha raises an eyebrow. And what does he mean by _relax_?

"I can tell because you stopped coming over and every time we're in the same room you get this look in your eyes like you're about to crack if someone breathes on you," Clint responds, "And now you're alone in the gym wreaking havoc on a poor unsuspecting punching bag. Now come on, ease up. I've had enough of this unwarranted game of hide and seek. Give me your bag.” He doesn’t say it with threateningly. He says it with a kind smile. The same smile that’s been affecting Natasha for months. Her shoulder slumps before she can even protest and her bag slides right down her arm. Clint takes that as a go-ahead and relieves her of her belongings. He sets their bags on workout mats and turns around to meet her face.

He observes the lazy ponytail that sits on her shoulder and coils of red hair pasting to her forehead with sweat. It’s like when she's in battle, only there’s less danger and adrenaline swirling in her green eyes. Still, she's very beautiful now. It captivates what appears to be her natural state of existence- ready for war at the ring of a bell and the perfect enchantress. He's really glad he convinced her not to walk out those doors.

"How are your handstands?" Clint asks, untying his shoes and stepping out of them to reveal bright purple socks. Natasha does the same, giving him an inquisitive eyebrow raise. She just shakes her head to herself, sitting down on her bum to loosen up her cramped muscles.

"They're fine," Natasha spreads her arms out as she sits in straddle position, "You say it like you've never seen me do them before."

"Dunno, just jogging my memory," Clint grins.

Flexibility was one of the things Natasha excelled at. Being only five feet three inches with a considerable bust and hips, she was chastised for not having the ideal body for ballet. So she made herself graceful in other ways, being sure to attain as much flexibility as her limbs allowed. It never disappointed her and served as a great advantage in combat. No one really expects a leg to come up from behind you and knock their teeth out.

Clint had garnered up all of his acrobatic skills from being in the circus and hanging around trapezes for too long. Aside from the exceptional hand-to-hand combat, endless knowledge of physics and trajectory skills and unprecedented archery abilities, he's considerably agile in his flips and stands. As for the splits, well, he'd lost some of his leg and hip flexibility with age and lack of rigorous training. For archery's sake, he kept up most of his arm and core strength pretty well.

He takes his place three feet in front of his partner, spreading his legs out in straddle position and leaning forward to stretch his hips and muscles. There's a gratifying pull that unlocks the tight flesh and joints that makes them groan in unison. They stretch their middle and front splits forty five seconds each before leaning back to stretch their spines. They've done this on a routinely basis before. It's no shock, watching their bodies contort into poses beyond the everyday human extent. This has always been the fun part about working out together and sparring. The commonality of uniqueness between them and wordless exchange. This is exactly the kind of endless communication that they can have without even opening their mouths. They can simply use their bodies to interact and it's still just as effective.

Clint is acutely aware of the fact that he has more abandonment issues than a field of dilapidated buildings. Is this Bobbi all over again? Has Natasha been trying to convey something to him that he's too stupid to see? Or is it...is it because of what he told her...about what happened to him as a child? This has to be his insecurity talking...

It dawns on Natasha with a jarring shock that the distance has done them no good. No good at all. The only thing she's gotten out of it is misery if anything at all. She has a quiet and confused archer on her hands and a lingering trace of guilt that makes her feel sick. She's not equipped enough for these...feelings. But she can't deny. This is what she wants...being with him...around him...next to him. After stretching her arms and hamstrings, she stands up, nodding down at Clint's hand again.

"Are you sure you're in the position to be doing anything with cut knuckles?"

"Of course I am," Clint responds coolly, looking a little less tired than before. "Who's the one that carried you out of a collapsing warehouse with a twisted ankle and sprained arm?"

"Oh please Clint, you always exaggerate that. I limped and you were mere bodily assistance."

"Whatever you say. I'm just as qualified as you are with your bruises."

Natasha just smirks at Clint for what she's about to do, letting him have the final word.

The elastic holding her hair back comes loose as soon as her legs go up in the air. Her hair cascades downwards, blocking her view but she doesn’t stop. She holds her handstand, arms not even shaking and feet still perfectly pointed. She goes into a deep arch handstand, spine curving like so. Her legs extend downwards into a split before she eases her front leg forward and lowers herself to an elbow stand. Her forward leg is bent, foot pointed to the ground, her back leg still in the position of a split.

Clint mimics her by going into diving right into a handstand with both legs pointed upwards in a clean arch. The muscles in his arms tighten and lock and he holds himself up for ten, fifteen, then forty seconds. His hand protests the action but he doesn't care. Feeling the blood rushing to his head as he opposes gravity is almost cathartic.

He's still holding his body up when Natasha comes down from her elbow stand. He's not even looking at her anymore. He doesn't break a sweat. It's almost unnerving. Natasha's tongue darts out to wet her lips. There aren't many things that she loves in this world but his strength is _the_ exception. How convenient it is that he's wearing a sleeveless top where his muscles are set in perfect place. Her body is reacting against her will as warmth spreads out low in her stomach and pools in her underwear. She's heavily aroused by this. Thank goodness for the sweatpants she's wearing. She just barely noticeably squirms on the mats. She's still not used to this. She probably never will be.

Clint bends his arms and arches his back so that his legs come forward. He rolls himself over into a back bend and comes right back up on his feet, catching Natasha staring at him with a hazy film over her eyes. He tells himself not to read too far into it.

"Not too bad, Barton." she puts up a front of nonchalance.

" _Clint_ ," he corrects. "Wouldn't want you to think any less of me."

"You were right about the stretching," her smile sends warmth to his tummy.

"I bet you can't hold yours longer than mine," Clint challenges.

"Oh is that so? You should know better than to challenge me, Barton."

"Clint."

" _Clinton_ ," Natasha teases. They fall into casual banter again. He's glad his plan is working.

"I'll give you a head start," Clint announces and before Natasha can ask what he's talking about, she watches as he effortlessly goes into a handstand for the second time, even though it's not the brightest idea on his injured hand. But he's done a fair amount of trapeze work on blistered and bleeding fingers in his past and considers this to be another tally mark on his board.

Natasha scoffs at the audacity that he felt the need to give her a head start. She follows behind him instantly, taking him up on the challenge. She centralizes her focus on her core muscles to keep her stabilized and pointed upwards. Barton's more of an expert in the theatrics of gymnastics. And while her training revolved around the basis of acrobatics and flexibility, her strength has always been more in her legs than in her upper body. Still, she can get into a mindset where she pushes her body beyond its natural wherewithal. They both know that doing freestanding handstands not only require great strength but expert balance and breathing control. Clint has spent many a time balancing on two hands on the edge of SHIELD HQ's rooftop. He's a sniper so he lives and breathes patience like it's in his bloodstream.

A minute passes. Then two.

And by three minutes and forty seconds Natasha realizes as her arms just begin to tremble that she's going to collapse to the floor before Barton so little as huffs in exhaustion and who cares if she's cheating when she brings her legs forward and kicks her partner out of his handstand.

A surprised yelp jumps out of Clint's throat as he rolls forward and collides with a mess of red curls. Natasha has him pinned in a moment, the heel of her hands pressed hard into the ground. She's looking down at him with a quirked eyebrow and a smirk of superiority when he tries to buck her off with his hips in a preemptive response to the attack. A few more squirms and Clint finally gives up, sighing with resignation at the assassin sitting on top of his lower half. She cheated, of course, because he was holding his body up longer than she could. But now she's in a bit of a dominant playful mood from the looks of it. Once they both catch their breaths, Clint tells himself once again not to read too much into the way Natasha's gaze looks almost feral in the sharp quiet of the air.

"What is it?" Clint pants into the open space. His eyes follow hers to his lips where she's watching intently. How did they end up like this again?

"Nothing," Natasha answers, knee pressed pointedly into his abdomen.

"You gonna let me up?" He almost doesn't want her to move.

She doesn't give an answer. She releases the pressure from his abdomen but sets her knee outside of him so that she's just hovering above him and he's caged beneath her arms and legs. _Clint I swear to god if you get a hard-on...control yourself Barton..._ He's free to slide from beneath her. But instead, Clint licks his lips and swallows to lubricate his dry throat, fists glued to the mats. He's unsure of whether he should be terrified or turned on. He isn't even sure when's the last time he had a woman sitting above him- a woman as suffocatingly gorgeous as Natasha Romanoff nonetheless.

He won't touch her.

Whatever happens, he is not going to touch her because his blood is rushing from his skull on course to a specific part of his anatomy. And his mind isn't at it's clearest moment right now. Maybe it's the buoyant effects from being upside down for so long but Natasha's eyes are flashing with a strange mix of lust and reticence like she _wants_ him. And her breath smells like cherry pie and he really likes cherries and she looks especially breathtaking right now with sweat crowning her forehead her intense gaze veiled beneath thick eyelashes and her untamed curls tickling his neck because she never tied her hair back up.

Natasha's response is to breathe out a heavy sigh that's more akin to a soft moan. Her eyelids are hooded while her stare switches between his lips and the look in his eyes. It's tempting, being in this position. She's been above countless men in the same pose. Only they were marks, mostly unappealing, and they were also about to eat a bullet or choke on their blood. Preferably the latter since bullets make more of a mess. This is the first time being above a man feels good- not rewarding but _good_. It's just the two of them in the gym, he's underneath her but he's also not moving away. A line of sweat dribbles lazily down Clint's neck and the veins in his arms bulge with enticement as he makes an effort not to move. Natasha's eyes are practically dancing with queries. 

_What do you want? What don't you want? Why can't I have you? Don't you know you have me?  
_

She doesn't even mean to do so but she catches her bottom lip between her teeth and ridges in the plump flesh is Clint's honest breaking point. It's a shock that no one has barged through the doors yet. He wonders if the SHIELD server feeds are picking this up, maybe whoever is on surveillance is reporting suspiciously lewd activity between two deadly assassins.

"Natasha, don't do that." Clint rasps. Goodness, he's rasping. His throat's dry again. He swallows a second time. 

“Don’t do what?” Natasha frowns softly. And Clint knows she can't help the fact that she's built like a bombshell but when she frowns it just looks seductive and pouty and he wriggles his hips to hide the obvious.

"Don't...look at me like that,” Clint sighs. Even if it's dead quiet in the gym, all he can focus on is the fact that his heart is pulsing in his ears and he can't hear a damn thing. He's never allowed himself to think twice about her sumptuous lips and the curve of her hips but this proximity and the salacious act that's associated with this position is making it more and more of a challenge.

“Like what, Clint?” she asks innocently. She knows what he means. But she also doesn't. Sometimes she never understands him or his actions. Oftentimes she doesn't understand her own self when she's with him. 

"Tasha..." Clint's utterance is barely a whisper. His eyes finally break to her lips because she won't stop staring at his. It doesn't help that there's indentations where her teeth are sinking into the plump flesh. It's- well- _sexy_. And there's a familiar heat radiating from her hips that makes him feel like he's on fire. He's so caught up in the deep fire of her rapture that it almost escapes him how Natasha's lip slides from between her teeth and the fact that she's slowly leaning into him. Her eyes look between the rumbles of their sweatpants and she can see a small tent where his crotch is. _So the feeling's mutual._ Clint looks especially handsome now, intense lines ridged into his forehead and open lips as he breathes in and out to steady his self. And now she's more than keen on kissing him, wanting to know how their lips slide together, if he's as good a kisser as he is with shooting...

She's agonizingly close to ceding any semblance of control she has left. All he has to do is move up and kiss her, she'll let him make the first move, just to be safe.

Instead Clint places his arms on both of her shoulders to bring her out of whatever haze she's in.

"Natasha? What are you thinking right now? What's going through your head?" He asks militantly. His whole body is screaming at him. But there are bells going off in his head because when has she ever shown any sexual interest in him for this to be something she wants as opposed to something she's doing out of obligation- or worse, trickery. And now she's trying to kiss him? He needs to be sure...he doesn't want to mess this up.

"The truth? Unvarnished?" Natasha's voice is shaky with lust and frustration and slight annoyance at the fact that he didn't capture her lips, like she'd been dying for. "It's like I'm going to break. Every time. You get close enough to me and I feel the warning cracks. Sometimes I want to run." _Run where? I know no safe place other than with you._ "One day, Clint, you're going to break me. And I don't want to break. I don't want to lose that part of me I have left to you...because then what does that make me?"

"I...I guess that's... something you have to figure out," Clint answers carefully. There has always been a steady flame burning between them. It's both benign and malicious and neither have bothered to put stomp the fire out nor toss fuel into the flame. Neither wants to get burned. But they also don't want to lose the warmth that's manifested between them either. He adjusts his hips again as his faint erection becomes more prominent. He blushes. "Er, am I too much right now? I can leave if that's what you want."

"What? Clint, no," Natasha finally frees him, sitting back with her knees tucked under her.

Clint takes a deep breath, fiddling with his sweatpants again to calm himself down.

"Sorry," he mumbles sheepishly when it becomes clear that Natasha can tell anyways.

"No, it's okay...I'm okay with that," Natasha assures him. But it seems like he still doesn't get the message.

Clint comes forward on his knees but doesn't back away. Natasha shakes her head, a candidly frustrated expression on her face.

"You don't understand what I'm saying, do you? Yes you're too much. But it's not in a bad way. I figured since you are the way you are and I am the way I am that exploring these feelings might end what we have. What I want doesn't-" she stops speaking. This is the irksome part. As many words come out of her mouth, her brain is pounding against her skull telling her that she shouldn't speak at all because what the hell is going to come out of this other than losing the only person who cares about her. She shakes her head to herself, eyebrows tense. She hates this.

"Nat," Clint can sense her struggle. Against his better judgement, he leans in closer to her, his fingers finding their way to Natasha's cheek and he strokes until she's looking up at him. She's not even thrown off my his touch. His kind caress is the warmest thing she's felt in a really long time. It almost hurts.

"There's very few things I'm certain of in this life. One of them is that I care about you. A lot. Probably more than what SHIELD regulation permits. But I've always valued our friendship more than anything else. This," he points to her chest and then to his, "Is the strongest thing I have right now. And when you started to distance yourself after Burma, it hurt, I won't lie about that. But you're you, Natasha, and I'm me and if this is how we have to handle ourselves then okay. After the first month, I let it slide. I thought maybe you were feeling too exposed after everything I told you. But then month two came. And month three. And after that I just thought you were done with me. Maybe I was too messed up for your likings, maybe I had too many hangups about sex...or I probably just wasn't enough." He didn't mean to say that last part. But it's the truth regardless.

"No," Natasha almost jumps up, "That's far from the case. You're more than enough. I distanced myself because I realized you're the first man I've wanted since the Red Room," the confessions spills from her lips quicker than she expected. "When you first took me into SHIELD, I had nothing to lose. I expected you to be like all the rest who were after my body. You learn not to expect human affection if the mass population of men regards you as an object. It stunned me that you never showed any outward interest in me. You were more fascinated with the way I handled a gun or threw a knife. It was new and pleasant. You gave me a chance to understand what friendship means and what partnership entails. You changed things for me and now I'm the one trying to convey my feelings without _seducing_ you. I admit your intentions were wrongfully misjudged. So I'm asking you not to misjudge mine when I say that I like you," the confidence in her eyes tell more truth than her words, "And I _do_ want you."

"Yeah?" Clint is almost in disbelief. His partner has never been a woman of many words. This is the most verbally expressive she's ever been. All this time, he thought she was doing what everyone else always does. He thought she was leaving too.

"Yes." Natasha bites her bottom lip again, can't help herself. "If you want me too. I distinctly remember you saying that you didn't want me to owe you anything. This isn't a debt. This is what I want."

"Then yes- _yeah_. But, I don't want it to just be sex," Clint tells her, thumb tracing stray circles on her cheek, "If you're looking for a sex buddy, it can't be me. I'm not like that." then he laughs softly, shaking his head, "Goodness, Tasha. You've gotta be more forward with these things next time, Tash. Sometimes I think too much or not enough when it comes to women." He almost sounds excited. Because holy smokes, this can't be really happening. It's almost hard to believe.

It tickles some foreign bone inside Natasha. She smiles and opens her mouth to speak but no words come out because someone cuts her off.

"Ahem."

The assassins jolt and break apart to find their handler standing at the gymnasium entrance with two files in his hand. He's staring at them with a neutral expression but his eyebrows are raised just a bit higher than usual.

The buzzkill of all buzzkills.

Natasha feels like ripping her hair right out the roots. Leave it to Phil Coulson to waltz into the gymnasium at a time like this.

"Agent Romanoff, Agent Barton. Good to see you two had your 'talk'," Coulson says coolly. There's insinuation there too though.

Natasha detangles her legs from Clint's (neither had realized that their legs were overlapping when he'd leaned in to touch her) and stands right up. She can't find her elastic. Clint hides how flustered he actually is by gathering up their belongings off the mats while his partner slides her sneakers back on. Phil makes a note that Natasha's hair is haphazardly undone. He purses his lips like he wants to make a comment.

But he vetoes it. He does, however, wait until Natasha's back is turned while she braids her hair to raise a judgmental eyebrow at Clint.

"You don't have to look at me like that. Nothing happened," Clint speaks up, "For the record." 

"I never implied such a thing," Coulson replies knowingly. "I have an assignment for both of you in these folders. It's not Strike Team Delta. The missions are separate." He hands Clint a folder first. "Barton, in there is a set of new agents that we need assessed and profiled. The aim is to weed out the weak. We need better shooters and better tactical fighters than the last group. We're also looking for anyone that might be useful to the linguistics department. We want variety this time." 

Indignation flashes across the archer's face. He hates breaking in new agents. You've got the cocky asshole males that think they know how to throw a proper right hook and females who would gouge eyeballs out if it means getting to the top. And of course the sexist bs between the group of agents he's going to have to correct time and time again.

"And what about me?" Natasha folds her arms across her chest. She doesn't know why but she has a foreboding feeling about whatever it is she's about to find out. Coulson hands Natasha her folder wordlessly. It doesn't go unnoticed by Clint that her face hardens as she grips the folder with icy hands and gooseflesh up her arms.

"Your target is Miguel Guerrero," Phil narrates, overlooking her reaction, "We have intel that he's running a powerful and dangerous drug ring. Hallucinogenic and fear-inducing toxins, mind control, the works. Word has it that he likes redheads which is convenient for you because you're going into deep cover."

"Where?" Clint asks after closing his folder. They'd never sent Natasha into deep cover operations before. And for good reason too...

"You know that's classified," Coulson chastises.

"I'm going to Sao Paulo," Natasha says anyways.

Her skin is bone-white. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can google image any gymnast/dance terminology that's used here you don't know about. :)


	7. Year Two Month Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sao Paulo and buried memories re-open wounds and the assassins are forced to put themselves back together

 

   

 

 

 

 

Y E A R   T W O   M O N T H   T E N

 

 

_**The salt from his tears** on little Clint Barton's tongue mingles with the sharp tang of copper and fear. A clean split starts from the surface of his lip to the inside of his mouth. He rolls his tongue experimentally only to find that his bottom tooth feels like it's about to come out if he pushes any harder. He's not sure which hurts more- the red bleeding welts on his legs or muffled sounds of his mother and father yelling behind the walls. He's huddled low in the grass outside the house with his arms wrapped tight around his body. As if he could protect himself from the raging fire of the monster inside the home. He would never have escaped had he not turned his attention on Mama. Now his body is locked together with panic and he can't bring himself to hide like he knows he should. He's listening as hard as he can because his mother's still inside. He can't tell what's happening to her but he has a pretty good idea.  
_

_Furniture clatters around like someone's been hurled across the room.There's a second thudding noise- the heavy sound of his father's construction boots addled with what sounds like a body stumbling over.  
_

_Silence follows. Clint's voice is caught in his throat. But then he hears the harsh wail of his mother's voice.  
_

_"Harold **don't**!" _

_And Clint relinquishes the scream he's been holding inside his fragile body like he's made of paper and glass. A cold hand comes from behind him and cups his mouth and before he knows it, he's being dragged to the the stables near the tool shed and thrown against the bales of hay. Clint wrenches free when he's put down and flicks his blonde hair out of his eyes to see that his attacker is just his brother Barney._

_"Pa's gonna kill 'er, Barney! Pa's gonna kill 'er I heard so!" Clint bawls, covering his face because it's his fault and he can't face his self._

_"Clinty, you gotta stop cryin. Clinty," Barney tries to hush the younger Barton, glaring sharply at him. He's always been the stronger of the two. Clint's always needed at least three legs to stand on. Always.  
_

_"I didn't do nuthin. I didn't do nuthin wrong," Clint hiccups, "I was quiet. He was jus angry for no good reason, Barn. He came in an' started beatin me for no good reason.Ya gotta believe me."  
_

_"Stop cryin!" Barney grabs him by his shoulders, "If ya keep cryin like a useless baby Pa's gonna come round here and finish what he started. D'ya want that to happen?"_

_"N-no," Clint hiccups again, balling his two hands into fists and wiping his tears. There's still blood swirling on his tongue. "My lip's bleedin.'"  
_

_"Let me look," Barney says, his red hair whipping violently in the sharp gusts of wind. "You've had worse. Stop snifflin' before **I** finish what Pa started."  _

_It's enough to make Clint finally stop. He's still bursting in tremors every two seconds but at least the tears have dried up. He hates when his brother threatens him._

_"How d'ya do it? How d'ya stay clear of him?" the younger Barton asks._

_"You hafta disappear, Clinty. Ya gotta make him forget you're there. Wanna know why Pa kicks your ass more than mine? It's 'cause you're not quick. You're an easy target. You don't know jack squat about hidin', let alone not makin' noise. Ya gotta be light on your feet. Like uh, remember when Mama took us to the circus an' we saw the fella'?" Barney looks up at the sky like the clouds will answer him, "The one who walked on the tightrope while shootin' arrows...Trickie...Tricker sumtin..."  
_

_"Trickshot." Clint quips, wiping his nose. "He was the best one in show."  
_

_"Yeah, that Trickshot fella. Real high in the air an' free an' can't nobody touch him. Ya gotta be like that. Okay?"_

_Clint keeps his head to the ground and Barney smacks him upside his head- not to bruise but to get his attention._

_"Okay??" his brown eyes are wide when he glares at his brother for a response._

_Clint nods carefully._

 

_" **Okay**." _

 

 

Clint knocks his lamp off the nightstand when he shoots up from his sleep. He swallows a huge gust of air into his lungs. His brain doesn't give his muscles time to respond when he rips his blanket back and prances out the bed. The actual lethargy isn't out of his bones yet because his hip connects with the nightstand.

"Aw, shucks," he groans as he rubs the sleep from his eyes with an unsteady hand.

The cold bites at the pads of his feet and he hisses. He dislikes the way cold sets into his bones. After nearly two decades of barely surviving Iowan winters, he'd decided that the cold is the eternal antagonist of his life story. It's a miracle that he manages to slide his socks on without breaking his neck. He has a mess to clean up.

He winces at the discomfort in his muscles while sweeping up the shattered light bulb. The nightmares are more akin to flashbacks within a dream. It's like there's a projector hooked up to his temporal lobe forcing him to relive every memory of his childhood that he'd done best to shed away.

Some nights ago he'd dreamed of his rapist and he couldn't touch his bed for days afterwards.

Past memories choose now to resurface in his sleep about his father and brother, who Clint makes an effort not to think of because there's bad blood and jarringly painful memories there.

The fact is he's slowly becoming a prisoner of his own subconscious again. This happens every few months where he gets in this state of mind and his body feels like it's been stuffed into a box that's too short and too narrow for him to move around in. These are the triggering periods of his life where he becomes mostly isolated until these months pass and he can resume a steady state of mind. Psych would have a field day with him. If he actually went when SHIELD regulation required.

The only light source in the apartment is the near-sufficient glow of moonlight spilling between the splits of his maroon curtains. He pads his way down to the kitchen to brew some coffee hoping that the caffeine will balance out the edge in his mood. Going back to bed honestly isn't the best idea right now. He has enough issues sleeping as it is. He'd rather not violently attack his furniture in his sleep while he's having nightmare. He glances at the digital clock on the shelf above the sink. It's six thirty in the morning and based on the damp smell in the air, it's going to storm later. He runs a hand down his moist chest wondering why the hell he didn't put a shirt on and it's practically zero degrees in his apartment.

His hands are still shaking. His fingers are pining for sensation. He should head up to the roof and shoot some arrows. Or pluck the dusty strings of his guitar (god knows when's the last time he bothered playing it).

But instead, Clint fills the coffee machine tank with water and adds a generous amount of coffee grounds to the sifter.

After filling his giant mug of coffee to the brim, he plops down on his sofa and clicks on the television. He's sure there's some obscure infomercials waiting for him to fall prey to. He keeps the volume low while he revels in the hot sludge warming his throat.

He'd call Natasha at a time like this. Just hearing the silk and honey in her voice had been enough for him to get through most treacherous nights. Which sounds all very _high school_ and even a little cloying but it's the truth. Ever since they made their feelings for each other clear, something inside him came to life. He's allowed himself to miss her and admit to the fact that he does and has wanted to be with her for a while now. So he's been anticipating her return like a prodigal son to a father.

Natasha was sent to Sao Paulo earlier than scheduled- _though he'll never confront Coulson about it, Clint has a feeling it had more or less to do with the way Phil found the two assassins in the gym that day_ \- and her deep cover assignment somehow found a way to last longer than either had hoped. Despite protocol ("fuck protocol, you're my best friend" had been Natasha's words) she had told Clint the entire layout for the operation.

Miguel Guerrero has his hands buried deep in one of Brazil's biggest telecommunications company and owns a private marketing company with imports from across the globe. SHIELD had gotten a fair amount of intel on him through a good year of surveillance and records investigations. Guerrero's a low-profile billionaire who's also a crook.

His indifference towards being in public makes it easy for him to lead a double life of crime. He's been running triple books under false accounts for decades. His company not only imports regular marketing items for consumers- but they're also importing various drugs that haven't gone through Brazil's regulatory agencies and falsifying shipment records to keep any lookers off their backs.

He's the perfect target for the Black Widow. Mid-forties, not too bad looking save for a mangled left hand, a man with all the money in the world but no one to keep his bed warm at night. Not to mention enough insecurities to feel special when a beautiful woman bats her eyelashes at him. And of course, Clint thinks begrudgingly, he's got a kink for redheads. Which, ugh god, makes his stomach flop upside down because he doesn't ever want to think about Natasha being in bed with another man, or letting that crook's hands anywhere on her body. He'll never ask if Natasha seduced him yet because he's pretty sure he knows the answer to that already.

They've held their unspoken agreement to keep contact through small texts and phonecalls while she was away and he was stuck at SHIELD doing the usual. But it's been five months. Five damn months since he got to smell her scent or feel her fist digging into his ribs during sparring sessions or hear the way she laughs in small quips.

Not that she'd spoken many words when he called (he called more often than she did). There would be something strange but soothing in her silence when he'd talk about what was on his mind and she in turn talked about what was on her's. Which was probably more than she had let on, but decided not to say because she felt he needed to use his words more than she did. He won't ask, she won't tell. That's fine. Clint would rather save those moments for when they're in each other's presence again.

Fuck, he misses her.

The op was supposed to be completed by month two but Guerrero had moved his trafficking to various compounds and Natasha has to find a way to shut them down without blowing her cover. It's not that Clint doubts her abilities. He knows she's the best person for this job. He's been caught in a bubble of angst between his inability to sleep without reliving the worst moments of his life and the fact that Natasha's last text message was a while ago.

Clint gnashes his teeth at the hovering taste of his father's bourbon in the air. He always hated the smell of alcohol when it transformed the resigned man into a furious beast with fists that gaped holes into his chest. The fear of not knowing when it's over, when he'll return, whether he'll calm down or tear the house apart...it's all coming back to him as he sits alone in silent chaos, waiting. This is how he feels now, uncertain of whether he should run or stand up to his demons.

 _Can't nobody touch you_ , Barney's voice echoes through the hollowed shell of his skull, _Can't nobody touch you._

But they all did and that's the damnedest thing. His dad used his hands to beat him into the ground. Doctors always touched him when he didn't want them to. The warden that he was supposed to trust ruined his life forever. Joining the circus with Barney and meeting _the_ Trickshot he'd been told to embody? Well, the same hands that taught him how to wield a bow and arrow had ended up pummeling him into the dirt and leaving him for dead. And there was Bobbi, who'd been the icing on the cake. He'd loved, not loved enough, and loved too hard all at once, being too much and not enough to keep her by his side. Everyone touched him without his consent, leaving bruises that faded but never quite went away.

He doesn't feel untouchable right now.

He feels like there are hands all over him- groping him, ripping him apart limb by limb, covering his mouth so no one can hear him scream. He can't get the sensation out of his veins. His own skin feels like poison constricting him. 

He doesn't want anyone to touch him- no one but _Natasha_.

And she's- _fuck_ \- she's not here right now.

Clint groans into the open air, clenching his eyes as the images bleed through him. The voices playing on the television start to agitate him. It's not helping.

Nothing is helping.

All the coffee's done is give him energy and lend him more time to delve into the entire fuckup of his life. He grips his remote, seriously contemplating hurling it across the room. Instead, he clicks the tv off and puts his mug in the sink.

He's never been much of a confrontational guy anyway, especially when it came to the things that sunk farthest inside him. Barney used to mock his acquiescent nature as weakness and had often punched him for it as if beating him would somehow make him a stronger man. No, strength was to be constituted with time and a pain of a different essence. Often one that meant being alone and trapped in what's quickly becoming a panic attack.

Clint's chest heaves in deep breaths, in and out, clasping the counter to ground himself. Anger is easy; a cowardice. Hatred can consume him, fuel him to release the man he keeps locked down behind bars. Giving in is not an option. Not today, not ever. Clint flicks the faucet on cold and splashes some water on his face. Nothing really does the trick for him these days. In the past he might have smoked a cigarette, might've shot some arrows into an abandoned building. But cold water will do for now since he doesn't trust his hands. Selecting the hand cloth off the counter, he sighs into the fabric as he dries his face. Some tension eases out of his muscles but he's not entirely calm yet.

 

_brrrrring_

 

The trilling of his cellphone startles him from his thoughts. Clint slams the faucet down when he realizes that someone's calling him. It could be Coulson asking him to come into HQ for an emergency evaluation or whatever reason his handler manages to come up with. He could ignore the call and have SHIELD kick his door in for not reporting when summoned. Or he can just put on his big boy pants and head to work because how else is he going to make use of his time for the rest of the day?

Scratching behind his ear, he unlocks his phone to find **R. Nat** under caller ID and it's enough to make his heartrate skyrocket to the clouds. A smile of relief cracks through his face and he slides his thumb across the screen to answer.

"Natasha?" he can't disguise the crackling excitement of hearing her on the other end that's leaving him breathless.

"Clint," Natasha's voice fills his body with warmth. But her response is clipped as if she didn't really expect him to pick up. Clint can detect that something is off.

She makes a hesitant noise followed by silence. Clint waits to see if she's going to say anything, holding the phone with tense muscles. But she doesn't so he raises his voice. "Is everything okay?"

"Guerrero is handled," Natasha huffs on the other line, all business-like and weary, "I'm on my way up the stairs. Be ready to let me in."

She ends the call before Clint can even confirm that he's in his place and not at HQ. But knowing Natasha, she can probably already tell that he hasn't left his apartment for a couple of days now. He did catch her spying on him that one time shortly after he'd come out of the shower. Uncanny.

Clint whirls around to survey the condition of his place. There isn't much to clean. Everything is mostly presentable. He tries to suppress all the alarms that something about her sudden arrival doesn't quite add up. You can never truly anticipate her next move, granted, but he knows her well enough to be able to tell when something is off. But he can't dive in too deep into his thoughts right now because she's on her way up the stairs and Clint hasn't even showered or brushed his teeth, or got a hold of his nerves. He shuffles around the apartment like a nervous teenager on prom night, fixing the pillows on the couch and spritzing some air freshener here and there since the atmosphere reeked of sweat and fear.

Just as he's about to fix his bed, a series of urgent raps against the door lets him know that his time is up. He slides into his favorite periwinkle t-shirt with a worn bullseye and hurries to turn the knob once the knocks grow more aggressive.

Clint almost gets a fist to his face when he yanks the door open while she's knocking. Everything in the air becomes thick with tension as Natasha Romanoff is standing in his doorway.

The first thing he does is give her a once-over, in-taking as much as she'll ever allow him to. Her curls sit around her shoulders in messy red coils and she has dark circles under her eyes that tells Clint she's had a really rough time in Sao Paulo. There's a ghost-like film across her face. Like she's there, but she's not quite there, and maybe he's a threat, maybe he's not. She looks the way she had when they first met, teetering far past the edge of a breakdown into something hostile.

"Hey, Tasha..." Clint starts to say but her demeanor is all _wrong_ when she steps forward into his space. Warning bells blare through his mind when he recognizes her stance as aggressive.

He barely steps back before her arms dart forward and wrap around him. For a moment, Clint is genuinely frightened for his life. He's seen her choke the oxygen out of targets with her thighs, who's to say she can't do it twice as quick with her arms. Tremors race through his body as her grip tightens. He doesn't want to make any sudden movements since she hasn't snapped his neck.

But like warmth transfers to cold, it dawns on him that she's _hugging_ him, not attacking him. And though her fiery curls are mostly blocking his vision he can still feel how she actually fits her face into the space between his shoulder and neck. He almost crumbles into her embrace like she's absorbing every bit of negative energy from him and rendering him weak and needing. Which is exactly how he feels right now.

In a tentative motion, he brings his arms around her torso and feels his shirt tighten when she wrings the material between her fists. She breathes something into his flesh, a sigh, or a whimper. Clint can't tell. All that he can think of is _her_ , she's here, appearing like a beacon of light on a smoky horizon and he's missed her so damn much.

He hopes she can't feel how hard his heart is beating beneath his shirt. He hopes she can't feel how hard his heart beats for her, pounding a resonance of something more alive than anything he's ever felt before. She smells like gunpowder and an old taxi cab, but underneath all the layers, she smells like a home he's never come to know. And in this moment, he thanks every part of the universe for setting the events in place in which he found her crouched on the ground in Prague. His tremors quell down to nothingness as he finally, _finally_   stops shaking.

"Okay?" Natasha whispers into his neck, like she knew exactly what he'd been thinking.

"Okay," Clint whispers in return. Somehow she'd been the remedy he needed.

She takes a step back, quirking her lips in that gorgeous idiosyncratic way she does. It looks like she wants to smile but can't quite bring her muscles to mimic the action. Instead she's regarding him with a scrutinizing eye that makes Clint shift awkwardly. He doesn't know whether to kiss her or thank her. Even the thought of kissing her makes him pleasantly nervous.

"Uh, did you run by SHIELD for a debriefing before you came here?" he asks, letting her fully step inside before closing the door. He kindly relieves her of her belongings (because he is a gentleman thank you very much) and arranges them by the door. She only came in a thin spring jacket and a crossover bag with god-know-what inside. Probably weaponry and SHIELD tech. "I'm shocked Coulson isn't wreaking havoc on my voicemail box right now."

“No, I emailed Coulson a report on the mission, that should be sufficient enough,” Natasha steps out of her sneakers, placing them to the side of the sofa like she lives here. She reaches under her shirt and produces a small knife that gets placed on the center of the coffee table. She knows by now that she can unload her weapons here. Clint's apartment is no fortress, but the walls are riddled with security systems, and he's not the world's greatest assassin (second to Natasha of course) without good reason.

"Yeah well, you know Phil. He's still going to want to do a one on one debrief for authenticity's sake," Clint reminds her, wordlessly admiring how nice it feels to have her fit so snugly in his space.

"I don't want to be at SHIELD right now. I want to be here." Natasha gives him a testing look as if she's expecting him to turn her away. Her eyes give more away than she'd like. But it's the truth. She'd rather be here right now than anywhere else.

"Uh," Clint's cheeks heat up, "Oh okay. Well, um," he scratches the back of his head, "You might wanna make yourself comfortable on the couch or something. I don't know if you're jet-lagged or anything....it's early. Sorta. Are you hungry?" he asks as he makes his way to the kitchen to prepare something for her. Surely her stomach has to be eating itself after such an exhausting trip. 

"No," Natasha replies, not quite sounding like she's within earth's orbit, "Nauseous, yes."

"Airplane?" Clint inquires, just now noticing the pallor in her skin under the lighting.

But she doesn't answer. She turns away from him, staring off into blank space with clenched fists and an uncompromising posture. 

"Tasha?" Clint walks over and brushes a few fingers against her forearm against his better judgement.

"I'm going to use your bathroom," she says absently, moving away from him.

"Uh, okay," Clint nods warily. He watches her walk methodical to the bathroom with a frown on his face. She disappears around the corner and shuts the door behind her with a soft _click_ noise. Clint shakes his head in mild confusion, running a hand across his forehead.

He ought to slide some more layers on since he's just standing around in his boxers. He pulls a thick pair of grey sweatpants out of his drawer, stepping into each leg and tying the drawstrings to keep them snug around his waist.

No matter how "busy" he tries to make himself, Clint can't shake the fact that Natasha's demeanor gives him a sense of disquiet.

First off, she went against protocol by not reporting into SHIELD for a face-to-face debrief. And why didn't she send word about the mission being complete when she was overseas? That had always been a habitual thing between them for solo missions: always send a text to let their partner know when they were heading back to HQ so they could be prepared to greet them at the entrances.

Clint knows more than anyone else that Natasha is extremely professional and efficient when it comes to this job. Most of that is probably derived from her training in Volgograd. She's uncompromising when it comes to work. She climbed higher through the rankings than any agent in the history of SHIELD. Her paperwork is always meticulously organized and very thorough. Natasha (much to Barton's annoyance when they're doing recon work together) makes use of every crumb of intel and delivers every single time for an op.

She's never been late for a mission briefing ever and trains whenever she can in the gym. The only "unprofessional" behavior she's ever had was failing to report for psych eval and even that was within very understandable reason given her record with people who know how to tinker with your mind.

Maybe he's thinking too hard or reading too far into it, but Natasha has never been overly fond of physical affection or contact. She might allow small hand touches or face caresses, but her hugging him as soon as she saw him after five months was...well...not like herself. Not that Clint minded the embrace because it was nice and intimate and probably something he doubted he and Natasha would ever do regularly. But there's something wrong with her right now. Natasha, in spite of her autonomous nature that Clint is sure no one else knows about, becomes an 'obey every command' type of agent at SHIELD. Like a cover, she adopts that persona at work to keep everyone at arm's length. She wouldn't break character unless something throws her far off. That's why she came to his place first. That's why she's avoiding going to SHIELD. Something is bothering her.

Clint rearranges his bedding, switching out the sheets while Natasha's doing whatever it is that she'd doing in there. It's probably not wise for her to be alone in a confined space and he might have listened in on her if he were more foolish. Between the dead silence in the apartment and the creak in his floorboards, Natasha would recognize his intrusion in a heartbeat. Not to mention he respects her privacy far too much to even eavesdrop. It doesn't stop him from wondering and worrying. Perhaps she'll be ready to talk when she's done.

A loud angry scream fills the open air. Followed by a ripping sound from behind the wall. Clint's muscles clench on instinct.

"Natasha?" he calls out, senses alert.

The only response is what sounds like glass clattering on tiles and the dull thud of a body.

Bedsheets put aside, Clint grabs Natasha's knife off the coffee and lunges across his sofa to get to the bathroom.

He can hear Natasha moaning quietly like she's in pain. He knows the sound all too well. And in those few moments he's a boy again, ear pressed to the wall, listening to his father standing above his mother with broken plates on the ground and fist held high ready to pummel her into the carpet. On instinct, it puts his body in an unduly state of stress.

"Nat?" he calls again, swallowing the queasy feeling down, even as his fingers once again dance with tremors. 

No response.

He tries the knob frantically but she had locked the door. He already eliminates the possibility that she was attacked from the inside given there's no way someone could get in from the outside. She had to have slipped and knocked over his toiletries. But instead of opening the damn door when he calls her name, she's keeping quiet and it's not doing Clint's anxiousness any justice.

"Hey, Natasha?" he calls a third time, "I'm gonna need you to open the door. Or at least say something, you know, a word?" he fumbles with the doorknob again, grunting as the lock doesn't budge. Natasha is still dead silent behind that door. Her moans of pain completely stopped. Clint curses her in a moment of anger because why the _hell_ isn't she responding?

He could pick the lock but that will take too long for his liking. He has a faster solution. He's gonna break the door in instead. He has done it a million times before.

Bracing himself, he locks his foot into the ground, his dominant leg in the front. He juts the base of his foot hard against the area below the knob once, twice, and a third time before the wood starts break with telltale splinters. He kicks a fourth time and the door makes an ear-splitting noise as it cracks open against the bathroom wall. 

Clint's jaw falls open upon the scene.

Natasha is hunched over on the ground with her knees tucked beneath her and curly hair obstructing his view of her face. She's pressing fluffy coils of tissue paper against her knuckles where bright red blood trickle from between her fingers and down her forearm and end in droplets of red on his floor. The bathroom mirror is wrecked with angry cracks that reveal metal where the glass used to be. And the remaining silvery shards sit around Natasha like she's supposed to be some kind of avant garde artwork. Her eyes don't meet his until his swears echo off the walls.

"Nat, what the hell?!" the knife clatters on the ground as Clint steps inside and yanks the first aid kit from the top of the mirror.

"Sorry. I cut my hand," Natasha rasps like she doesn't even recall what just happened seconds ago.

"Did you fucking punch the _mirror_?!" he stares at her in naked shock while he grips her unwounded arm firmly and brings her out of the bathroom into the living room area. He sits her down on the sofa, ignoring the fact that she's dribbling blood everywhere. He wastes no time sitting down at her knees and setting up the tools. He starts by peeling the tissues away and using cotton swabs to clean away the profusion of blood. The slits are all on her knuckles, thank goodness. She probably has a hairline fracture in there somewhere. His instincts _told_ him there was something wrong about all this. "Nat why would you do that? You weren't even in the bathroom for five minutes! And the mirror of all things?"

"I looked in the mirror and didn't like the person staring back at me," Natasha explains, her mind far too spent to devise a lie, "So I attacked."

"And who was the person you attacked?" Clint stares into her eyes, looking for any signs of life but the green in her irises are glossed over with a familiar dullness.

"It was Natalia." Natasha answers, flaring her nostrils if that's any indication of how much the cut hurts. It probably hurt more saying 'Natalia' than it did him picking out the micro shards of glass from the cuts with tweezers.

"You're not Natalia." Clint affirms, a moment of calm in his voice as he concentrates on getting all the glass out. "You're Natasha Romanoff."

"Sometimes I don't know the difference between the two," Natasha admits truthfully, eyebrows furrowing and then evening out like she almost doesn't comprehend the words coming out of her mouth, "I think I have been Natalia for a while now."

Clint pauses his ministrations, looking back up at her. The dark circles under her eyes are more prominent now that he's kneeling before her and she's looking straight ahead.

He's unsure of what to make of her words. Was she triggered while she was in Sao Paulo? Because if that's the case, then he won't hesitate to storm into Fury's office in an uproarious fit. It has always been a major concern that had been discussed between him and Director Fury early on that Natasha shouldn't be allowed on deep cover missions, especially so shortly after her defection. You can't just take someone like the Black Widow and allow her to become someone else while she's far away from the closest thing she has to stability.

He resumes his stitching, sewing her knuckles up as well as he can. He hopes she isn't conscious of the way his fingers tremble as he slides the prolene in and out of her skin. God knows she appears to be keeping it together better than him even though they're both aware that it's all pretense. Or perhaps just something that's become part of their natural instinct. Clint finishes binding her torn skin together, cutting away the extra bits of silk and setting the forceps in the medic kit. Clint brings a stray ice pack from the freezer and seals it to her knuckles by wrapping it with gauze around her hand. 

"Just keep that on for about twenty minutes," he instructs as if Natasha doesn't know any better.

Natasha just swallows in response, thanking him with a nod.

"So," Clint gets up off his knees and angles himself gingerly on the couch next to her. "Are you ready to discuss this? You...appearing out of thin air? Punching my mirror? Not reporting to SHIELD yet? What exactly happened during the Sao Paulo op?"

"I believe I experienced triggers while in Brazil," Natasha doesn't dance around the edges of the truth.

"What kind of triggers?" Clint asks.

"I killed a child."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Clint chokes.

"The last time I was in Sao Paulo, I killed a child," Natasha's eyes hold more weight than the words spilling from her lips, "Daughter of an enemy of the Red Room. His name was Drakov. Just Drakov, or that's what they told me. He was a physicist that had worked with a separate department of the Red Room. At some point, he managed to slip away with documents he'd procured from my then-superiors. He foolishly chose to celebrate his success by going away on vacation in Brazil with his daughter. So my handlers sent me after him to teach him a lesson. My job was uncomplicated. I've tortured men before in ways your imagination can't grasp. And my handlers made it quite clear that they wanted Drakov to intimately understand who he had stolen from. It was easy to seduce him, to slip into his room, use my knife to slit his appendages open as a I extracted every ounce of information he had to offer. After all, they wanted to ensure that he endured hours of torture before his inevitable death."

 _They,_ Clint notices how Natasha always refers to the Red Room as they, as a conglomerate of individuals as opposed to one person. As if she never quite came to know who it was that she took orders from. His fingers find refuge in the cushions when he grips them as Natasha goes on.

"The mission only became complicated with the unanticipated presence of his daughter. She had all-around-access to her father's rooms at the hotel they were vacationing in. I found her standing in the doorway where I would make my exit. My first thought was one of the earliest lessons in the Red Room. No matter the nature of the mission we weren't allowed to leave behind any witnesses or evidence of our actions. Drakov's daughter was a liability. She could easily have described my identity to the policia. She could never forget my face. How could she? I was taking her father apart limb by limb and she'd walked into the middle of it. I was running out of time and I knew there was only one option. Either I could kill her or they would. I was taught that death by bullets are a kindness. So I shot her first, right through her skull. And just as her father began to cry out, I put a bullet in his mouth to silence him once and for all, completing my mission."

"Nat..." Clint tries and fails to put any words together. He shuts his mouth because what can he say to this? She carried this with her all the way to Brazil and back. Why hadn't she opened her mouth once when they spoke on the phone? She could have said one word, any word, and Clint would have dropped everything and took off to give her any semblance of comfort. Her words are a blunt gut to his stomach.

All he can picture is young Natasha making the choice put a bullet in a child's brain. All he can do is imagine the way the gunshot must have echoed through the room and down her bones when she pulled the trigger. How stern her expression must have been when she turned around and did the same to the target.

Fuck.

That's the only word he can conjure up.

Natasha stares Clint hard in his eyes, almost daring him to look at her the way any sane human would. But Clint doesn't flinch a muscle. Either he's too professional or too desensitized to this part of her. She feels selfish for wondering if he could even still want her after confessing that she purposefully murdered a child. The hospital fire in Prague had been accidental in its child casualties. But this murder in Sao Paulo was deliberate. And she's in disbelief that he can he still look at her with such forgiveness in his eyes.

"How do you know it's not another false memory implanted into your mind? How do you know this isn't another one of the Red Room's dazzling psychological fabrications to keep you prisoner to their will?" Clint proposes, as if she hadn't just told him how she murdered a child in front of her father.

Most would label his reaction to her as nothing short of disconcertingly psychotic and borderline dissociative. But this kind of response comes with the territory of being an assassin.

He's accumulated this overall numbness through years upon years of sitting high up out of sight with his weapons trained on the targets. Because from far away you have to be up close, you have to know your target, know their patterns, know their every step before they stretch a limb. He can watch his targets put their children to sleep and put an arrow through their skull as soon as they step into their car. It's a necessary foreign intimacy that comes with the territory.

It's _not_ that he's inhumane. It's just that he's a goddamn professional with a reasonable level of immunity from all the years of this life that he has notched under his belt. He knows a target when he sees one. And Nat was living her whole life with a red dot on her forehead.

" _Because_ ," Natasha answers in rueful confidence, "It's not like a dream or a repressed memory, Clint. There isn't any lingering doubt about this. I received praise from my handlers for the way I took care of the situation. They were under the impression that I had done so as part of Drakov's torture run as opposed to out of fear for my own life. They thought it was progress," she shakes her head as if she's disappointed in herself. "His daughter was the first kill I regretted, the first kill I've _felt_. She was six years old, Clint. No older than I was when they took me. She was _six_. And I was sixteen. Ten years difference and her entire future stood between a bullet and a hand on the trigger."

"So did yours," Clint tries to reason with her but she's convinced of her savagery.

"Guerrero didn't just keep a low profile because of his criminal activity," the ice pack crinkles as Natasha's fingers clench around the gauze wrap, "He was a father who wanted to keep his child safe and out of the public eye. Even SHIELD had no intel on his daughter. Which is what made this entire Sao Paulo gig a reconstruction of the Drakov operation. Being in Brazil again brought a foreboding that brought triggering memories. I wasn't sure at first that the child belonged to him. But he tucked her in every night before he went on to do his dirty work. It complicated the mission. And I couldn't risk compromising myself because a child was involved."

"Why didn't you tell me this while you were away?" Clint shakes his head in daunting realization, "I could have at least-"

"It didn't _matter,_ " Natasha interjects, "Not at the time. Once I had closed in on Guerrero's shipments and sent the locations to SHIELD's database, Coulson gave me the go ahead to take out Guerrero. He made me sick because he was the same man Drakov was. Quiet, unassuming, and far too powerful. And I didn't like being in a place that reminded me of the monster I had to become. This was something I wanted to put to rest immediately. I had to put on a persona that would take care of this mission in a way that wouldn't get to me. I became her, just for that night. I convinced myself it would be easier. I took Guerrero to bed to get him away from his security and completed the mission the way Natalia would have done."

Natasha's face darkens and she continues, "I chose to make the kill intimate. And as soon as I slid my blade through his throat, I heard five knocks on his door. His daughter. She was asking to be tucked back into bed after having a nightmare. But Guerrero was already slain and with him being unresponsive, I knew it wouldn't have been long before Guerrero's security swarmed the room. I let Coulson know that the mission was close to being compromised and escaped using the balcony."

"How'd you dispose of the evidence?" Clint has to lubricate his throat before asking.

"I didn't. Coulson ordered a SHIELD tac team to do a clean sweep."

"Geez, Nat," Clint rubs a hand across his forehead. He's trying to figure out why Coulson hadn't uttered a single word about this to him, not once while he had him reporting for duty. Natasha is still his partner. She's still part of Strike Team Delta. He still has an obligation, outside of work and in, to her well-being. "What happened to Guerrero's kid?"

"I know that SHIELD has protocols for terminating targets with children. I know I broke half of them. I don't care for the reprimands that Coulson or Fury will give me. You know I've faced worse punishments... What matters to me is that that child will never get to say goodbye to her father, Clint," Natasha admits. Because it does matter. And it does stab her with sharp silvery shards of regret. "I know few things of compassion, of loving a parent and having that sentimentality reciprocated. I know that I lack the understanding for what real humanity and innocence is but..." she stops herself, quirking her lips in growing frustration.

"But what?" Clint's voice drops to a hoarse mumble.

"I can't help but ask myself. Is this all that I am?" Natasha whispers, "A murderer? Someone who makes children orphans? Someone who is no better than the ones who wronged me?"

The archer's heart shatters when she says those words. They sound like broken echoes ringing through a brittle bell, splitting his heart to pieces. She's slipping now, and he can feel it inside of his body, begging him not to let her melt through his fingers.

"You listen to me, Tasha," Clint sits up, "You had the chance to do what Natalia would have done and rid of every factor that could have compromised the mission. Instead you protected Guerrero's kid in more ways than her father ever could have done. Come on, Tasha, we both know that one way or another, be it SHIELD or some other organization he's pissed off, Guerrero's head was on an inevitable chopping block. His kid might have very well been killed along with him. Her father was robbing his country, running all sorts of criminal rings and experimenting on drugs that would have ravaged the civilian population. You did what needed to be done, Natasha. That kid is never gonna know what kind of man her father truly was. At least she gets to mourn a facade, at least she gets to have those good memories. Now SHIELD will handle the rest. That kid will be in good hands eventually. This isn't their first rodeo with orphaned children. And you want to talk about innocence and love and humanity? Those things are a luxury that people like aren't always fortunate enough to have, Natasha...but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. It doesn't mean you don't deserve good things. You can learn humanity. You can learn love."

"Love is for children," Natasha counters, stiffening up at the mention of love.

"And yet you and I have never had innocence," Clint responds, "We could be children now. How would we know? We've never lived through a childhood, let alone the blissful ignorance of one. Natalia was a prisoner enslaved to fear and compliance. Natalia was as innocent as Drakov's daughter, as innocent as Guerrero's kid, and as innocent as Natasha Romanoff is."

Natasha scoffs at that. Innocent is far from the word she'd choose to describe herself and her actions. 

"You don't even see it. You don't even see how _good_ you are. And I don't know how to show you," Clint sighs resignedly.

"I don't get a happy ending," Natasha says on broken vocal cords, "I get burned buildings and blood on my hands and a ruined mind. There is no happy ending, no good chances for me, Clint. There's only ugly. Ugly everywhere, inside and out."

"That's not true-" Clint starts.

"Don't lie to me, Don't you _dare_ lie to me, Clint," Natasha raises a finger to stop him.

"I told you already, Natasha. I told you why I didn't make that kill shot. Did you believe me then? Do you believe me now? Because if you're a monster then what does that make me? Huh? It ain't cut and dry. There's plenty of blood and dirt and empty bullet shells to go around, Nat. Coulson ever tell you how I ended up on SHIELD's radar?"

"...what?" Natasha's eyes are rimmed with red when she looks up at him.

"I was a killer," Clint says, "Still am. I lead a reckless life, falling off of goddamn rooftops and getting caught in bad businesses, killing men and women alike. I didn't care much for myself or for the people I got paid to get rid of. It just became muscle memory, as plain as picking out apples from the fruit section at the local grocery store. A suicidal assassin with tunnel vision makes for sloppy patterns. SHIELD caught up to me in due time, cornered me in an alley. Gave me two choices. And now look where I am. My actions are in the past, not all buried, just lingering. Reminding me but doing my best not to let it consume me."

Even during her struggle with right and wrong, Natasha's racing thoughts hit the wall at his confession. The question taunts her again.  _Who are you Clinton Francis Barton? A murderer? Like me? What could you possibly have done to think you are anything like me?_ Natasha knows they both will always have their demons in one form or another. She knows this man but how much does she _know_? There's a good chance that he knows her better than she knows him. And she's not sure how she feels about that.

"I don't pretend to be a noble person," Clint continues, "And I'm not asking you to either. I'm asking you to give yourself a chance for once in your life. Give yourself a chance if no one else will. It has a way of getting unbearable, I know...and it's easy to swallow a bullet, take a knife to your throat, whichever you prefer. But what's the use in that? What would you have made of this life in the end? You can't sit here and convince me that after all of this, all that you've done on behalf of SHIELD, for the world, that you don't deserve second and third and fourth chances. You don't need a happy ending, Natasha. But you deserve a good one. Or at least as good as good gets for you. I wouldn't lie to you on this. You know I care about you, Tash."

"Doesn't matter if there's all this red," Natasha still sounds dejected, like she's taken a hundred steps back from wanting to be with him to closing herself off again.

For a moment Clint thinks she's talking about the bloodied cotton balls and the mess but then it occurs to him that she's referencing the red in her ledger, the kills, and everything else she's done.

"Red where?" he asks, fear gnawing at his heart.

"Everywhere," Natasha answers sullenly. 

"So you wipe it out," Clint resolves with a patience in his voice that soothes everything over. "Like you said before, right? Making up for the past by doing good? It's not easy. The road will has more sharp turns and potholes and bumps than smooth asphalt. But aw hell, Nat. You made it this far, right?" He gives her a hopeful smile, trying to give her any sense of honest assurance.

Natasha sighs in response, not sure if she's feeling relief from his words or from the mission being over.

Clint nods like he understands before getting up to clean away the mess. He takes his time, gathering up all the materials and closing the first-aid kit. He sweeps the cotton swabs and snippets of silk into the trash and returns the med kit to the bathroom.

"I'll pay for the bathroom door and the mirror," Natasha says when he returns from around the corner.

The cushions dip down and she almost falls into him when he sits closer to her.

Clint shakes his head, dismissively waving his hand. "Don't worry about it. Mr. Nabiha will repair it for me. I kind of did some damage earlier myself." When Natasha raises her eyebrow inquisitively he shakes his head to diffuse the worry from her face, "It's a long story." He motions towards her iced hand. "It's been more than twenty minutes. Time to take this off."

He quietly unwraps the gauze to get to the ice pack, throws it in the garbage behind him, and rebinds her hand after re-inspecting the stitches.

"You heal pretty quick," he mumbles.

Natasha doesn't respond to that. She regards him like a child waiting for permission before sliding her unwounded hand into his upon instinct. They've touched hands before, in a quiet moment of assurance and admiration. But this isn't that. This is her seeking comfort and trusting that he's willing to give it.

A smile curves his lips as Clint turns his hand over to encase her fingers in a warm grip. His hands are big enough that hers disappears in his when he holds it this way. And it's a relieving feeling, one that swarms through Natasha and begins to melt away her hard exterior.

Clint swallows when her green eyes that had been lifeless moments ago flicker at last with emotion. Worn out and all, she's a mass of perfection he knows he isn't worthy of. He resists the urge to take one hand a tuck the stray coils of hair behind her ear.

For a man who never liked to be touched here he is now craving the action. He wants to be touched by her. Years and years of abuse and brainwashing had been put into trying to fracture her golden surface to make her irreparable and still she is strong enough to break the world in half. Strong enough to break him. And he just might want her to.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Natasha finally asks, a faint hue or red in her cheeks.

"Like what?" Clint responds, his smile growing.

"Like this doesn't change anything. Like you haven't forgotten about what happened five months ago. Like you still want me after everything I just told you."

"Because I _do_ still want you," Clint emphasizes with his grip on her hand, "And I do still want this, and it doesn't matter how many bloodied tales you spill on the table. What we said five months ago still remains true. These few months have been a living hell for both of us. And I've missed you. Those phone calls kept me sane for most nights when my mattress felt like it was trying to eat me alive. But if you're not ready for this anymore and you want to take a few steps back, then that's fine. You'll always be my best friend, first and foremost."

Natasha cracks a smile, shaking her head at his words. God, his benevolence...

"I think we should get some rest," she confesses instead, looking behind her at his bed. "I'm admittedly tired. And I can tell you're tired too."

His bed does looks inviting, tousled sheets and all and she'd like to slip under the covers with a male that's not a mark for once.

"Can't really sleep even if I tried, Tasha," Clint mumbles, still not all the way ready to close his eyes again.

"I'm fine with just resting," Natasha offers as a concession, "We don't have to sleep."

What she wants, she realizes, is body heat, the smell of cherry blossoms, and his quiet breathing.

"We can do that," Clint nods with realization at her offer.

The cushions hiss as they get up from the couch, Natasha letting Clint lead the way as they venture to his bed. Clint pulls back the comforter and waits for Natasha to slide in first before he gets under the covers behind her.

The first thing Natasha does is nuzzle her nose into one of the pillows, and the smell of Clint Barton, and the kind of sweat the keeps you up at night fills her nostrils. Her eyebrows wriggle in understanding as to why he wasn't too keen on getting back to bed. She swallows and exhales before turning face up. Her elbow jabs him twice while she squirms around to get comfortable but she can't. Her body and this mattress don't agree with each other.

Clint finally clears his throat and she pauses. He unfolds his arms expectantly, motioning for her to come closer.

Natasha burrows herself as far as she can into his embrace because she's comfortable and he's seeking comfort and he's offering himself to her, an offer she cannot refuse. She commands her body not to let a single tremble slip through. If she were in a hair's less control, her body would be shaking as if she were hysterically sobbing. But she doesn't shed a single tear. She believes that part of her has been wrung dry and left to blow in the wind.

"Is this okay?" Clint whispers.

"Yes," Natasha says. It's more than okay. His arms are secured around her like a great fortress and his body is hard and soft and warm all at once. He fixes his face into her neck, breathing in a way that feels so alarmingly real that she's almost convinced it's a dream. Wistful feelings like this only exist in dreams because realities are so unkind to her.

No, reality has never been forgiving or patient with her. It's always jutted her forward into puddles of blood and the sharp taste of gun smoke in the air. She is not Natalia anymore, and she is no longer slave to those people. So she gives herself a reality she can live with. _Clint_. Her best friend, her partner, and perhaps, if she does it right, something more.

Turning over in his arms, she splays her hand against his face calmly, her fingers tracing every feature she loves most about him.

Clint is like gravity. He's unconsciously pulling at her center like she’s a molten core of earth metals, churning with a heat only he can ignite in her. She can't help the way she's sucked into him like she has just the right amount of mass to stay in his orbit. The pad of her thumb strokes the path of his jawline, her bottom lip sucked in as she admires him and he stays still while she does so. There’s such intensity to him, raw in the way his arrows thud into a bulls eye, sharp in the way he draws his knives. He’s a cool flame. A living breathing testament to the fact that second chances do exist. And thirds. And fourths.

He's regarding her with eyes that say more than his words ever will. The adoration in them sucks the breath from her lungs, and Natasha almost breathlessly brings her thumb up to his eyebrows and down his cheek. He's not handsome if you glance over him idly. She can't imagine that many women at SHIELD give him any more attention than regulation requires. That's fine by her because she likes the lines of age etched into his face, the shape of his eyes, the always gentle storm-grey in them, and the curve of his lips. She finds him _beautiful_. He _is_ beautiful in every way. At one point she would have considered this dangerous, letting him wrap himself around her this way, figuratively and literally. But Clint has changed so much for her. If there is an escape from this feeling, she isn’t sure she’d be willing to take the route. She can trust herself with him. She can take that leap.

"I want to kiss you," she declares, both to herself and to him. "I'm going to kiss you."

Clint licks his lips in response, all semblance of any poker face vanished.

"Okay," his voice croaks much to his mortification.

Natasha wastes no time cupping the base of his skull and pulling him down against her. In one breath, she slants her mouth over his and seals her promise.

The kiss was meant to be chaste. Instead it starts off heavy, hot, and hard as their lips and tongue create sensation that start from Natasha's heart and pools low in her abdomen. Heat bursts all through her like the blow of the burner when you flick the stove on. Clint takes the back seat in this kiss, letting her suck, kiss, and lick every bit of him away until he's raw. She hooks her arm around his neck and slides her tongue into his mouth without warning.

She can't remember the last time she's wanted to slide her lips across another man's. But it's _Clint_. And his lips- strong and confident- move across hers in faultless coordinated steps. He's an expert kisser, kisses like someone who means it. And he does.

The warmth of his hard-muscled body on top of hers is nothing short of agonizingly erotic. Natasha fights against squirming against him but then he groans into her mouth and his tongue finally rolls against hers and she flicks her hips upwards while he backs his hips away carefully.

A second groan slips from Clint's lips as he tries his earnest best not to grope her anywhere but her face. He can't recall the last time he kissed a woman. He can't recall the last time a woman had looked at him the way Natasha did. He can't even recall the last time he was this comfortable to let someone touch him this way.

Natasha's fingers interlock with the tufts of hair growing from the nape of his neck and she pulls him harder against her mouth, a small moan rumbling in the back of her throat. She's hungry for more. More sensation, more of his lips, she wants to feel his breath on her face.

"Mmm," Clint breathes, "Tash." he manages to pull back, "Don't wanna tear your stitches," he reminds her, "Southpaw, ya know?"

He actually feels her laugh while he reaches out to stroke a curl behind her ear. Natasha's eyes are now bright green, pupils blow wide under his careful gaze. A flush spreads across her cheeks and spreads down to her chest.

He almost blunders 'my god you're beautiful' but stops himself. She digs her nails into his hips as she leans forward to spread her lips across his neck, aching for more sensation. He's making her feel so alive, making her feel human, making her feel like she's more than what she is. Clint moans in defeat, slanting his mouth hard over hers again. He pours as much definition as he can into her mouth as his emotions begin bursting at the seams.

He cannot believe Natasha is letting him do this.

Natasha keeps her eyes open, eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks. She wants to see him as he's kissing her. She wants to see how much he means it. She feels it. She locks her arms around him, letting his lips revive every stolen part of her. She’s needed this absolution- they both have. Everything is tossed to the wind in these moments of fervor. Sao Paulo, Drakov's daughter, the nightmares, the pain, all of it.

Up until Natasha's hands take a new course of action and begin sliding down his torso...

Clint taps down the panic that threatens to rise when she curls her fingers at the edge of his shirt and one hand spreads out against his lower abdomen.

"Easy, Tasha," Clint disguises his jolt of panic with a chuckle. He breaks the kiss and buries his head into the pillow next to her. "'M not ready for any of that yet."

"I'm sorry," Natasha shakes her head, biting her bottom lip and mentally berating herself for getting too carried away, "I...did I trigger you?"

"No, it's not you, it's me," Clint's voice is muffled by the pillow he's currently face-planting. "It's just been a few bad months of unhappy memories."

"Does it bother you when I touch you?" she questions, prepared to extricate herself from his embrace and leave if that's the case. The last thing she wants is to be the cause of his distress. Especially if she was reading the kiss in all the wrong ways.

At that a surge of laughter rips through Clint and he shakes his head, sitting up with both arms on either side of Natasha's head. There's a smile on his lips.

"God, no. It feels just right, Tasha. Just right," he promises. "Not to be cheesy or anything, but we just had our first kiss."

It's Natasha's turn to laugh warmly at what he just said. _A damn hot first kiss_ , she muses momentarily. A defiant coil of red hair springs forward and Clint tucks it back behind her ear before she can even move.

"Okay?" he asks, rolling over so that they're on their sides again. He needs to make sure she's truly alright after everything that just transpired between them.

"Okay," Natasha answers, covering her heart with her hand for fear that he just might see how hard it's beating for him.

 _Can't nobody touch you_ , Barney's voice plays like a faint taunt in Clint's head. And he was right. Barney was always right. No one can touch him.

No one but her.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to my main homeslice aili aka shadesfalcon she's the realest beta on this earth
> 
> and if you haven't read her fics on here 
> 
> WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR
> 
> 10/10 ur life will change if u follow her on tumblr and read her fics here on ao3

**Author's Note:**

> Don't forget to leave comments/reviews. They're much appreciated and keep me going.


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